


Tidal Distortions of a Neutron Star

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, F/M, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Lotor (Voltron)-centric, Mindfuck, Season 5 compliant, but brief and surreal body horror, right up until that last episode anyway, theoretical physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 16:37:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14382675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: It defies explanation, the dark smear of colour and light that streaks towards them—eating the distance with thousand tendrils that flail and curl over themselves at every meter gained—and he finds himself wondering hazily at the type of intelligence that would spawn from such a form. Lotor stares at the great beast as it rises, ancient and nameless, before them like a dumbstruck child gaping at a particularly flashy light show.He swears he can hear his name crooned over and over like warped lullaby.Maybe trying to traverse the white hole to get to Oriande was not the best idea Lotor had ever had.





	Tidal Distortions of a Neutron Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Leapfrog](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leapfrog/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Scarlet and Bible Black](https://archiveofourown.org/works/288446) by [paraTactician](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraTactician/pseuds/paraTactician). 



> [playlist for the fic](https://playmoss.com/en/chronolith/playlist/tidal-distortions-of-a-neutron-star) because I got entirely too invested into this one.
> 
> Thank you both [AmbivalentLangst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambivalentlangst/pseuds/ambivalentlangst) and [Mogi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpace_Dragon/pseuds/TheSpace_Dragon) for reading through this monster. All errors are my own and have nothing to do with their generous editing.

_Les déités des eaux vives_  
_Laissent couler leurs cheveux_  
_Passe il faut que tu poursuives_  
_Cette belle ombre que tu veux_

Guillaume Apollinaire “Clotilde,” _Alcools_ 1913

The first sign that things were, perhaps, not going to go according to plan came when they first breached the boundary of the white hole. The rippling shimmer of refracted light parted around them like a curtain of rain, gravitational waves beating upon them like their bodies were the stretched skin of a drum head—reverberating with the unseen force so that each hushed word they spoke took on a strange flange. Their voices echoing with countless tones their mortal throats could not hope to produce.

Lotor watches as Allura walks before him, the sway of her hips setting off ripples that fragment as they move across the transmission medium. (transmission of what, precisely, Lotor hesitates to say. the laws of physics as he understands them seems to have an unstable hold in this liminal space) The path they follow stretches and coils before them like the fractals of a disintegrating DNA strand, each branch multiplying into infinity. He shakes his head trying to dislodge the image, presses shaking fingers against his eyelids to make silent explosions burst across the backs of his eyelids and wonders not for the first time if he’s led them all to ruin. 

He knows that neither the path nor the sway of Allura’s hips are real, merely the fragments his mind attempts to throw up as feeble shields, understandable markers, in this realm of shifting reality. His mind desperately trying to find a way to make sense of their path along the gravitational field that has neither surface nor form—no centering mass. 

(the humans have a poem he heard once:

_things fall apart; the center cannot hold_  
_mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,_  
_the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere,_  
_the ceremony of innocence is drown;_

when he’d asked, the Black Paladin had shrugged, gaze distant. “There was a war once,” he’d said. “Most of a generation died and the rest went mad.”

Lotor likes the poem) 

The limits of carbon-based sentience have never been made quite so rudely and completely obvious to him until this precise moment.

The boundary lies before them stretching endlessly across the horizon, a rippling well of energy that refuses to resolve into a form of which a sentient being might make sense. (nothing of which he can make sense) Instead, it continues to shift through repeating patterns of increasing complexity until he blinked and reset the entire cycle. Lotor’s tempted to catch hold of Allura’s hand—pull her back, confess that their voyage is a mistake, a terrible one—but he keeps his hands to himself.

(his pride is a monstrous thing)

Allura turns slightly towards him, head tilting, and he follows the slender line of her arm as she points to something in the near distance. “—getting closer?”

Sound moves oddly, as if refracted—deformed—by the gravitational pressures of the white hole’s distant event horizon. He shakes his head and Allura frowns at him. She catches his arm and pulls him to her side, turning him to bring him in line with whatever it is that has caught her attention. “Allura,” he starts, and she shakes him, gently, before pointing more insistently. “I do not –“

The words die stillborn and ashy in his mouth as the distortion Allura’d spotted captures his attention as well—a swelling spot of inky darkness that shimmers like an oil slick across the roiling brightness of the white hole’s endless energy output. Her hand tightens on his arm as he sucks in a surprised breath. A nameless dread rises within him, pressing against his throat like nausea, and he finds himself clutching at her hand where she grips him, white-knuckled and crushing. 

It defies explanation, the dark smear of colour and light that streaks towards them—eating the distance with thousand tendrils that flail and curl over themselves at every meter gained—and he finds himself wondering hazily at the type of intelligence that would spawn from such a form. Lotor stares at the great beast as it rises, ancient and nameless, before them like a dumbstruck child gaping at a particularly flashy light show. 

He swears he can hear his name crooned over and over like warped lullaby.

Lotor flings up an arm, pulling Allura behind him, a feeble attempt to shield either of them from this alien intelligence that looms over them. He can feel it pry at his mind like fingers pulling at a locked door. Behind him Allura breathes out a startled sound, muted and shaking. 

He freezes, caught between the horror growing before him—a storm of shrill insanity expanding like a soap bubble and he’s desperately certain they need to be anywhere but here when it finally implodes under its own tension—and the catastrophe he can feel building behind him. Allura’s hand seizes on his arm, a stray neural firing, and his head snaps around to stare into her wide eyes.

Her fingers spasm in his madly, a pulse of neuron to nerve to muscle. Her eyes widen impossibly, the white of her sclera visible all the way around, and tears start to form at their corners. Her mouth pops open on a tiny, hitching gasp.

“Allura!” His voice echoes oddly through the medium, proximity to the white hole’s event horizon warping sound waves like a stone thrown into a still pool.

Her hand claws at her throat, drawing lurid red lines down the delicate skin before he can pull her curled fingers away. Her back arches like bow, caught tight and trembling in his arms, as thin black lines climb up her neck, along the sharp line of her jaw, following her veins. 

Allura shudders once, hard, and curls into herself, fingers clinging to him. When she raises her face to his, the tendrils have almost reached her eyes. “Go,” she whispers as shivers start to over take her. “ _Run!_ ”

Lotor cocks his fist back and knocks her out cold without a word.

(his pride is a monster)

///

It’s difficult to say which infuriates the paladins more when he finally succeeds in dragging both of them back to the castle—limping, blood dripping from his nose, his ears, and Allura a dead weight in his arms—the fact that he has incontrovertibly lead them all into ruin, or the fact that he hit their princess.

If Lotor is entirely honest, he’s not sure which of those two things upsets him more either.

(he’s a liar)

///

Captivity is, Lotor realizes as he lies spread as completely as the tiny cot will allow, painfully boring.

The monotony of pale furniture against pale walls lit by small pale lights is broken only by the inconsistent flickering of the auxiliary power systems that run but fitfully. The only reprieve from his own spiraling thoughts are the occasional visit from Allura’s Paladins. Their rage and terror universal, if expressed erratically through their individual quirks. 

They are, all of them, floundering in the still and the dark as something older than the death of stars slowly consumes Allura’s mind.

He rolls to one side as guilt gnaws at him as constant as a rat with a fresh bone.

(“I can’t do this without you,” he’d told her. statement truer than he could have ever imagined)

Their uneven journey towards the white hole’s ever distant boundary, the growing sick shimmer of whatever elder intelligence that sits shivering and mad inside Allura’s mind, the desperate race back to the castle play on endless repeat through Lotor’s mind. Each moment frozen and perfect for introspection, for him to pull apart and inspect for the precise moment of his catastrophic failure. The rising terror and fury in her eyes as inky tendrils crept through her veins is seared behind his eyelids. An afterimage he sees on every blink. 

Even without the Paladins’ furious accusations Lotor is exquisitely aware of how completely he has betrayed Allura’s unwise trust.

He curls into a tighter ball and wonders, distantly, if when the time comes they will allow the life support to prison sections of the castle ship to fail along with non-essential areas or if he will die along with them—gasping and cold. He’s not sure which he prefers.

(he tells a lie. he knows which one he fears)

The lights dim, flicker madly for a moment, and then resume their faint existence. He wonders what brought about that fluctuation. Wonders if the clever Green Paladin has found some new technological wonder to use to try to free their dreaming princess. Or if it’s their engineer, trying in vain to jump start castle’s energy grid. If they’d asked, Lotor could tell them in exacting detail how these attempts would fail, but the Paladins are unlikely to ask. They have, to a one, written him off as an untrustworthy mistake at best, an active traitor at worst.

Lotor does not expect to see any of their faces ever again. The thought of dying alone in the dark terrifies him less than he would have thought, earlier. He finds himself oddly resigned to the idea.

The hushed hiss of the energy barrier dematerializing jars him into wakeful alertness. It is a new sound in the silent shadows of his captivity, and an unexpected one. Until this point the Paladins had been content to stand on the outside of his little enclosure to shout at him. Not one had set foot inside his pitiful domain. 

The Blue Paladin stares at him, expression inscrutable, as Lotor hauls himself into an awkward seat on his tiny cot. 

“Can I help you,” he asks as politely as he knows how.

“You had better be able to,” the Blue Paladin replies, tone both sardonic and harsh. “Or we’re all, you included, fucked in every orifice we have and probably a few we don’t.”

Lotor blinks at the sudden flood of profanity. The Blue Paladin had not, until the immediate present, been one of his visitors and until their fateful disaster inside the white hole, he’d never given the young man much thought. He knew, distantly, that Allura valued him, sought him out when distressed, but he had never found much reason to consider him beyond the fact that he was a Paladin and very, very young.

“I assume you are referring to the current, ah, situation with Princess Allura,” he inquires softly.

The Blue Paladin yanks his free hand through his hair—a short, sharp gesture of irritation at odds with his otherwise easy posture—and bares his teeth in what could, if one were unobservant, consider a smile. “Situation, yeah, that’s one way of describing it. Unholy clusterfuck might be the other.”

Lotor curls his hand into a fist to keep from running it over his face. “Your compatriots have already come by to excoriate me or to extract what information they deemed useful.”

That earns him a disgusted snort. “Fat lot of good any of that has been. You don’t know what’s currently in her bloodstream, you don’t know why we have to basically chain her to a wall while she makes noises like blowing bubbles in tar through a straw, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know.”

Lotor blinks at the surge of words and then slowly cocks his head to one side. “If you are so convinced that I know nothing useful, then why are you here, Blue Paladin.”

The sneer that moves across the Paladin’s face is beautiful in the depth of expression. It is the epitome of disdain. “Although I think you are, basically, the perfect example of a useless douchenozzle with delusions of grandeur, I also am pretty sure that neither Pidge nor Hunk asked the right questions because, as much as I love those nerds, they are the most classic of hard-sci nerds and I’m pretty sure this is more, like, a Lovecraft horror show. And Shiro probably just came down here to give you the disappointed glower without doing anything _useful_.”

The sheer amount of words that spills from the Paladin’s mouth leaves Lotor feeling breathless and flustered. It’s as if the Paladin uses language itself as a blunt object to bludgeon his opponent into submission with and Lotor would be damned if he admitted defeat. 

“Ah,” he says slowly, drawing out the vowel to buy himself time to think. “And what questions do you think would be more … informative, Paladin?”

“Okay, first, fuck you and your prissy attitude,” the Paladin says, counting off his esoteric list on one hand. “Second, I have a name and it’s Lance. Third, yeah, I do have questions I think are more useful, first of all: what the fuck is going on in Allura’s mind?”

Lotor goes very, very still before he can stop himself. He’d had inclinations, premonitions, deep and unsettling feelings in his gut that perhaps this was the case, but he hadn’t dared to think that he might actually be correct. “I am afraid,” he says carefully. “That you will need to specify.”

The boy rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I don’t think I do,” he replies, sharp and snide. “I think you know exactly what I mean. Y’all went into that white hole and Allura came back out gibbering like a fucking psychopathic cultist of some elder god from a bad pulp fiction horror novel. What gives?”

Lotor bites down hard on the first response that springs to mind (‘Allura’s sanity, obviously’) and takes the question more seriously than presented. “We encountered an … entity in the white hole. What we had previously taken for a guardian of Oriande was, I believe, something else entirely.”

The Paladin draws up the only stool in Lotor’s tiny enclosure and makes an obscure gesture with one hand. “Fuck my life,” he drawls, lazy and insolent. “So, I’m not far off with the entire ‘mind eaten by an eldritch monstrosity’ theory, am I?”

There are any number of ways Lotor might respond to that surprisingly simple yet antagonizing statement, the desire to meet snide dismissiveness with an equal measure of disdain presses against his mouth like a physical force. Lotor finds himself swallowing against it, almost alarmed at the way this slender—fragile, really—boy manages to drag such pettiness out of him. “I believe your theory to have several hypotheses which are currently being proven correct,” he says carefully, picking each word with care. “I also believe you already know this.”

“Yeah. Well,” one slender shoulder moves in a smooth arc up and down, “I’ve read my Lovecraft. I can recognize weird chthonic horror-terror shit-show when I see it.”

“I’m afraid I do not know this Lovecraft,” Lotor says with a thoughtful tilt of his head. He thinks through the list of philosophers and scientists who have studied extra-dimensional entities and finds himself, unsettlingly, drawing a blank. “Was he a scientist of some note?”

“Oh, my fucking—” the Blue Paladin starts and then stifles himself with one fist pressed against his mouth. He presses it against his lips until they go white and then breathes out a long, slow breath before removing it. “No. He wasn’t. And its not actually even remotely important or relevant to this situation. I mean, it is relevant,” he says and then waves one hand before shaking his head. “Ugh, fuck, whatever. No. Let’s focus on the task at hand, namely how do we kick said eldritch monstrosity _out_ of Allura’s head.”

There is a surreal, overwhelming quality to the sheer amount of words that spill forth from the Paladin’s lips, like ink from a tipped inkwell. Lotor feels as if he is drowning under them, having all sense beaten out of him by them. “Is this a type of interrogation technique?” He inquires curiously. “This deluge of words? Do you overwhelm your interviewee through sheer mass of language and then slip in a relevant question?”

If it is, Lotor thinks, it is a very effective technique. He finds himself compelled through spite or sheer self-defense to match the Blue Paladin word for word though he knows this to be unwise.

“Again,” the Paladin grinds out between clenched teeth, though Lotor has no idea what could have possibly upset the boy. “Fuck you. And, maybe just maybe, focus on the important bits rather than being a condescending asshole. Like, just try. For Allura. I know you hate the rest of us, or think you are so much better, but maybe just maybe put down the prince of pretension façade and try to be helpful. I promise you won’t sprain anything.”

It’s the sheer volume of words that Lotor finds staggering. He hardly knows how the boy keeps up with them much less expects anyone else to. When he mentions this, he gets the most expressive eyeroll he has ever had the good fortune to witness and sharp snap of fingers.

“Focus, Prince of Pretention,” the boy snaps, sharp as breaking ice. “We got shit to do.”

What any of this has to with feces, Lotor does not know nor does he wish to, so he keeps his mouth closed and raises one eyebrow.

“Ugh,” the Paladin says eloquently. “Anyway, thanks for establishing that we’ve got an eldritch monstrosity chewing on Allura’s mind—that’s just fucking awesome, a shit cherry on top of the what the _entire_ fuck sundae of today—now what do we do about it?”

Lotor blinks. “My apologies, but are you approaching me with a request to craft a plan for recovering Allura’s mind?”

“No, dickweasel, I’m here because you are such a stunning conversationalist and I really enjoy playing a rousing game of ‘how to sound like a pretentious asshole’ on endless repeat,” the boy snaps back. “Yes, obviously, I am here to try to figure out what we can do. I’m not going to leave Allura like this.”

There’s something going on in the subtext of the Blue Paladin’s rambling diatribes that tugs at Lotor’s attention. Something that shifts between the words and lives in the boy’s tone lends the impression of something being rushed, of time constrains unspoken. “The rest of your compatriots do not know you are here,” he asks softly. “Do they?”

That earns him a look so deeply contemptuous he wonders briefly if the Paladin had perhaps borrowed the expression from his father. “Of course, they fucking don’t,” the boy sneers. “No, we don’t have a lot of time before they come looking for me. And yes, we’ve tried pretty much every idea that we’ve had including the thing with the cyropods. Any other mindbogglingly obvious statements that you want to get out of the way before we actually get on with things, or are you going to just hang around spouting off every dumb thought that pops up in between your pretty ears?”

“Well,” Lotor says, stunned. “No, I believe you have stated most of them for me. Thank you for clearing up the obvious questions. What’s the plan?’

“Plan is,” the boy says simply. “That you come up with the plan, remember? I’m the robo-monster expert, Prince,” he says as he presses a hand to his chest and bows low. “Not the inter-dimensional horror-show monster expert.”

“What, precisely, do you want, Paladin,” Lotor asks, pettiness sliding into his tone despite his best intentions.

He expects the boy to snarl back or dismiss him with a flood of profane and cutting words. What he is treated to, however, is the boy suddenly collapsing inward, gaze swinging away from Lotor’s to stare hard at the floor, mouth twisted in a pained grimace. “What I want is for Allura to get up and smile at me,” he says quiet and soft and grieved. When he looks back up his eyes are like glittering shards of glacier ice—cold and deadly despite the tears shimmering in them. “And if I’ve got to carve that out of your body, _trust me_ , I will.”

The depth of grief and determination in that gaze leaves Lotor a little breathless, knocked sideways. “Noted,” he replies. He wants, badly, to get up and pace, but feels this would be a demonstration of his unease, an unwise show discomfort. So, he keeps his back straight, his feet firmly planted to the floor, and folds his hands neatly in his lap. “Have you attempted a mind-dive on Allura?”

“A what now?” the boy asks blankly.

“A mind-dive,” Lotor repeats and the Paladin continues to give him a completely blank look devoid of even the faintest flicker of recognition. Lotor sighs. “So, no one has attempted to enter her mindscape?”

The Blue Paladin waves his hands in the air in front of him. “How the fuck?”

“Well,” Lotor says slowly, as if speaking to a very young child or a particularly slow individual—both being correct in his estimation of this particular paladin. “First one has to be a psionic of some form and then one must be able to establish an appropriate psionic link, or I suppose you could brute force the issue if one had sufficient technological capacity to directly create a neurological pathway between mindscapes, but that is purely theoretical.”

The sudden deeply thoughtful cast to the Blue Paladin’s face fills Lotor with a sick and rising dread. 

“Huh,” the boy says thoughtfully. “ _Huh_. Like…”

Lotor cocks his head as the boy trails off, expecting some sort of question or at least sarcastic commentary. But he gets nothing more than thoughtful silence as the Paladin drags a finger along his lower lip, slow and contemplative, eyes narrow and focused on some point in the mid-distance. Lotor starts before he can stop himself when the boy springs to his feet and paces the entire length of Lotor’s little cell before coming to stop in front of him to stare down at him from the boy’s, rather negligible, standing height. 

Lotor meets that contemplative gaze as placidly as he can maintain. (if he gives away nothing, then nothing can be used against him.)

“I’d say wait here,” he says, lips twisting into an ironic smile. “But. Well.”

“Yes,” Lotor drawls back. “Very droll, but are you quite certain we have time to trade clever banter?”

That causes the Paladin’s face to shutter like a warship bracing for impact, all parts of him going still and tense. Then he smiles with all his teeth. “Point,” he says. “See you in a few, Prince.”

Lotor wonders if he’s just earned himself the enmity of the Paladin, and if so for how long.

///

Lotor does wonder what constitutes ‘a few’ in the Paladin’s estimation. A few ticks, a few dobashes, a few thousand decafeebs. He recognizes that his sense of time is, perhaps, slightly distorted by the fact that he has precisely nothing to do but measure out periods of waiting. He finds himself once again sprawled out across the tiny cot, one leg dropped idly off a side and staring blindly at the white expanse of the bulkhead. 

The lights flicker oddly in the Paladin’s absence. Lotor amuses himself by counting time between their uneven flashes and finds they pulse in a rhythm not unlike the beating of an anxious heart. The air steadily grows heavier and Lotor wonders if the Paladins have found a way to re-route power or if they are steadily decommissioning section after section. He imagines them standing, faces drawn and worried, before a plan of the Castle, carefully marking off sections. 

(he wonders when it will be time to mark off his)

“Are you sure he isn’t dead?” A high and piping voice asks. Lotor hauls himself into an easy cross-legged seat, too light-headed and dazed to do anything but blink at the pair of intruders.

“Nah,” comes the Blue Paladin’s breezy reply. “I’ve been making sure that emergency power routes down here even when we’ve had those weird flickers because Allura’s gone all grimdark cultist-crazy.”

“You’ve returned,” Lotor notes distantly. The air seems both too thin to carry sound and yet too heavy to draw into his lungs. He finds himself sweating slightly with exertion though he cannot for the life of him find the cause.

The Green Paladin studies him sharply for a moment before turning to her companion. “I think you might want to up the oxygen levels down here—sparkle pants Lord Emperor of All Known Space over there looks like he’s gonna have a fit of the vapours.”

Lotor scoffs at the idea. “I would have noticed,” he informs them archly, and catches himself swaying just a little. A tiny list leeward. Barely noticeable, really. “If I was physically compromised in some manner.”

He blinks and tries to pull back when his vision is suddenly full of the Blue Paladin’s sharp blue eyes, narrowed into skeptical slits. “Yeah,” the boy drawls slow and obnoxious. “I’m thinking she’s right. Get used to that, by the way, since she’s smarter than you, me, and pretty much any gaggle of geniuses you want to throw together.”

“No pressure or anything,” the other Paladin mutters. Lotor turns to look at her, feeling oddly muzzy and dislocated now that he’s sitting up, a tightness across his chest dragging on his every breath. “Lance, stop messing around and see if you can get the life support down here set to Galra levels,” she says with a small frown. “Or use that baseline Coran made of Keith.”

The boy snaps his fingers. “Dude, good call,” he says with a grin. “See, Prince Pretentiousness?” he asks nonsensically, and points both index fingers at his companion with a grin. “Smart.”

“Lance. Now. Before he asphyxiates,” the Green Paladin remarks mildly. “You were pretty insistent that we need him alive and not jettisoned out an airlock, I assume that means with a mind not completely atrophied by lack of oxygen.”

“Would we even recognize that, if it occurred?” the boy asks, cocking his head to the side in dramatic contemplation. Lotor makes a faint sputtering noise and glowers. “I mean, it was his brilliant fucking plan to go frolicking around in a white hole, getting Allura’s mind eaten by Cthulhu and us stuck on the ass end of nowhere.”

“ _Lance_ ,” the girl snaps.

“Going!” He yelps, scrambling out of Lotor’s personal space and out the dematerialized door of the holding cell at a truly gratifying speed.

“Do you remember my name?” the Green Paladin asks quietly. It’s an odd question to be asked in that soft, careful tone.

Lotor scans his memory for a name that fits with those bright brown eyes and nimble fingers. “Pidge?” he offers. “I know humans have, typically two names, but I believe I was only ever told the first.”

“You were,” she says as she unspools a long coil of wires from around one slim arm. “And Pidge is correct.” She eyes him as if he were doing something odd, something that required careful consideration, though Lotor isn’t certain what he’s done to trigger that reaction. “Do you remember which lion I pilot?”

Lotor considers the information he has at hand and her diminutive form. “You wear green armour, so I assume you pilot the Green Lion as to do otherwise would be an odd contravention of colour schemes,” he remarks. “But I’m not certain I was ever specifically told.”

“You weren’t,” she says. He watches in what he feels is a companionable silence as she sorts wires from what looks like the bastard child of a targeting headset and the insides of a holo-terminal. She asks him other small questions, easy things, mundane things. Her face draws tighter with each answer. He resists the urge to press a hand to his chest where it aches with the effort to drag in a breath. Something in his posture, some small tick of movement, draws the Green Paladin’s attention and she eyes him before sighing. 

“Let’s hope Lance can get life support matrix sorted,” she says apropos completely nothing as far as Lotor can tell. “Or this is going to be a very short experiment.”

Lotor cocks his head to one-side as a persistent thought tries to connect like an electrical circuit that won’t quite link. When it finally does he inhales sharply. “You’ve discovered a method to brute force the neural link,” he says, giddy with the discovery and (perhaps, maybe, perhaps) the lack of oxygen. He reaches out to touch the crown of wires, frowning slightly at the way his hand moves slowly as if through heavy water. “Some kind of electrical pulse to mimic the voltage-gated calcium channels?” He asks and can’t quite keep the open delight out of his tone. “How did you bridge the synaptic gap?”

The Green Paladin blinks at him, clearly startled by the question. Her eyes, he notes with quiet interest, are an odd amber colour in the low light of his confinement chamber. She shrugs, grunts, and goes back to fiddling with the device in her hands. “Honestly,” she says without looking up. “I’m not completely certain because Altean science is like two-parts respectable mathematics that sane people can understand and one-part complete mystical _bullshit_ that is an affront to both our lords Kepler and Einstein and should honestly just feel bad for its collective sins.”

Lotor can feel his eyebrows raising with each word that tumbles from the Green Paladin’s lips. When she comes to a stop her cheeks are pink and she glowers at him as if he personally had something to do with the general state of Altean science and her ire with it. “Altean alchemy is a quite powerful force,” he offers quietly. “And follows clear alchemical formulae not unlike your differential calculus.”

The girl narrows her eyes at him and points one finger at him. “ _Bull. Shit_.” she says with perfect annunciation. “But I want to see those formulas when we’re done with this particular bit of turbo-charged idiocy.”

“Working from the assumption that either one of us will survive this particular lapse of judgement upon my part,” Lotor replies, painfully aware he is saying something that might be a kissing cousin to an apology. “It would be my pleasure to show you.”

That earns him another grunt in reply, but he thinks the harmonics of it are pleased. She shakes out a series of cords and tosses them the length of his cell. “Coran is still hopping mad that any of us believed you when you were talking about Oriande,” she comments lightly as she threads the cords out his cell and drops them over the edge of the catwalk the keeps him hovering over uncertain doom. “But, from my perspective, so much of this is already an incredible pile of incomprehensible bullshit why shouldn’t we have believed that you could actually enter a white hole and find some sort of mythical paradise? Makes about as much sense as semi-sentient robot lions that form a super weapon, right?”

Lotor frowns. “The mechanics behind Voltron make quite a bit of sense once you take into account the trans-dimensional properties of the—”

She waves him off with one hand, still feeding a length of cord into the shadowed depths with the other. “That was a statement for rhetorical flourish,” she informs him. “Not request for enlightenment. I have spent long enough up to my elbows inside my own lion’s mechanical guts to have a pretty good understanding for how the entire thing works even if some of the more mystical bullshit offends my delicate scientific sensibilities.” 

“It’s not random,” he protests. “It’s not mystical. Magic is merely a different branch of scientific endeavor no different than chemistry or molecular biology.”

The look the Green Paladin turns upon him is so flat it could be used as a carpenter’s level. “What?”

Lotor wishes that he could get more than one solid lungful of air for every three breaths he drags into his aching lungs. The Green Paladin might actually be on to something with the idea that Galra need more heavily oxygenated air than humans. What a mortifying thought. He watches as she seems to count out some esoteric measurement of cord before coming trotting back into his little enclosure. He gives her a thoughtful look. “Was that a request for information or mere rhetorical statement?

She flashes a smile at him that shows quite an awful lot of teeth. “We’ll call it a request for information for the moment.”

Lotor eyes her and then shrugs. “I’m not entirely certain how to go about explaining it,” he says as he thinks through the problem. He’s not certain where the limits of human science lie and what constituted ‘mystical bullshit’ in the Green Paladin’s estimation. 

“Grand,” she says, her tone as dry as any desert. “First, he tries to give me an explanation when I don’t want it,” she doesn’t look at him as she continues her obscure and, though he’ll never tell her given her current outburst, vaguely arcane arrangement of wires, cords, and devices within his little cell, “and then when I do ask for an explanation he can’t provide one. There’s a joke about the universality of men explaining things to be made in there but fucked if I can find the time to make it.”

“It’s like trying to explain music to someone who has ever only known percussion,” Lotor says. “How would you describe a symphony?”

The girl pauses in her esoteric organization of devices and tilts her head to the side. “Well,” she says slowly, as if testing her words for a potential trap. “It’s like percussion, there’s the complexity of the beat—rhythm—that forms the framework for the interplay between the melody and the harmony.”

“Ah,” Lotor says, drawing her to a sudden stop and earning himself an impressive glower. “But how would you explain either melody or harmony?”

“There’s, uh, different notes,” she begins.

“But how do you explain a note?” he asks and tucks away a smile as a slow scowl of understanding starts to creep across her face.

“They are different frequencies of sound,” she begins and then stops herself before throwing up her hands in frustration. “But how do you explain frequencies to someone who only knows _rhythm_. Ugh. This is infuriating.”

“Yes,” Lotor agrees. “It is.”

She points a finger at him. “This isn’t over,” she says. “I’ll think of something.”

Now Lotor does permit himself a smile. “I have no doubt,” he says. “I will also try to think of a non-infuriating way of explaining things.”

That earns him a snort and something that might be a smile if she wore the expression for longer than a micro-tick. 

The uncertain moment shatters like a soap bubble as the Blue Paladin comes bounding back across the catwalk, all long-legs and unexpected grace. “Hey!” he shouts by way of greeting. “I got the life support systems down here all fixed. Man, that required some very fast talking around Coran,” the boy points two fingers at Lotor and cocks his head and hip to one side. “He does not like you.”

Lotor can’t stop the eyeroll and sigh. It’s as if this boy was designed piece by piece to dig underneath his skin and annoy him.

The Blue Paladin looks suspiciously between his compatriot and Lotor, frowning thoughtfully. “Hey,” he says, drawing out the vowel long and irritating. “Were you two bonding?” He asks. “You guys were. Man, fuck that, Pidge,” his voice is a high, wheedling whine, “You know there’s to be no bonding with Prince Pretentiousness. You’re breaking rules.”

“Rules you made up,” the Green Paladin replies placidly before settling behind her computer. The low light reflects off her glasses in odd and unnerving ways. “Like I was ever gonna play attention to that. Anyway, focus, flyboy. We are running against the clock currently kept by a grimdark girl who only talks in incomprehensible gibbers. Move ya butt.”

The boy snaps off a jaunty salute. “Aye, aye,” he says. “And what does my captain command?”

“I threw down the cables. I just need you to get down there and hook them up. Should run us a power link right up to the main isolation wing in the med bay. Hunk’s all set up and ready to go to maintain the neural link up there.” Her fingers fly across the narrow keyboard, the tapping of keys a sharp percussion against her snapped off orders.

This makes the Blue Paladin frown. “We’re gonna have Hunk watching Allura all on his own?”

“He can do it,” and the conviction in her voice has even Lotor convinced though the Blue Paladin continues to look skeptical. She glances up and smiles at her friend, soft and fond. “You have to let him do things on his own, Lance. He’s got this.”

This collects her a series of incomprehensible grumbles, one annoyed shrug and then a sigh so heavy it makes the boy’s bangs flutter. “Yeah, okay, fine. You want me to just, what, rappel down there?”

“Or use your jetpack, whatever.”

Lotor tunes out their playful bickering—anxiety and tension hiding behind banter—and focuses inward upon his own mental defenses. He’d not thought that they would actually reach out to him in this manner, would trust him, but desperation breeds a unique kind of recklessness he supposes. The chinks in his mental armour, the gaping holes there in the form of a square-shouldered, tailed silhouette, send a shiver down his spine. 

(he treats these children with patronizing gentleness, but he’s just as lost as they) 

Lotor takes careful inventory of his mental resources, taking note of his exhaustion and suppressed fear, and files each piece away as if detailed analysis will change the shape of the battle before him. Even if the Paladins manage to find away of brute forcing the neural link that doesn’t result in permanently scrambling his or Allura’s brain he’s unsure of his own ability to lead her back from the well of festering insanity she’s apparently fallen.

“Okay,” says the Green Paladin in a tone that cuts straight across the increasingly anxious spiral of his thoughts. “We’re set up.”

“Now that I’ve been up and down that damned chasm approximately a million times. Man, fuck Alteans and their collective hardon for aesthetics over functionality. Have the fuckers ever heard of a damned elevator? I’m pretty sure my callouses have callouses and no amount of pumice is gonna fix that,” the Blue Paladin whines.

His teammate bounces a small stylus off his head and snaps her fingers at him. “Focus, flyboy.”

“Focusing!”

And with that they turn their disconcertingly sharp and eager gazes to him. “So,” says the Blue Paladin, all focus and annoying cheer. “We have a plan and you are, much to my unending frustration and dismay, kinda fundamental to it.”

The Green Paladin holds up the crown of wires and grins crooked and feral at him. “This is an Altean neural scanner that, do not ask me how because I will be forced to answer ‘magic’ and that hurts things inside my very soul, manages to form something like the neural link you were talking about to brute force a mind-dive.” She pauses. “Or, well, it does now because I’ve modified it.”

The Blue Paladin takes the crown from her and spins it around one finger. “Where you come in, Prince Pretentiousness, is you will be the one to do the mind-dive because, sadly, our education as paladins has not--shockingly!--covered trans-dimensional eldritch monstrosities trying to eat our minds or how to combat them. A major oversight, I know, I’m writing a letter of complaint to the dean as we speak.”

“Give me that, doofus,” the Green Paladin says as she snatches the crown back. “It’s delicate and if you break it then I guess it will be of great comfort to the Garrison and your dick that you died as you lived, fucking over each and every one of us personally.”

“Pidge!” The boy gasps in delighted scandal. 

“Are the pair of you going to actually divulge your plan,” Lotor asks, far snippier than he thinks is probably wise but he’s tired and cranky and probably still suffering the effects of oxygen deprivation. “Or are you going to continue on your witty little side show? Truly, you could play it for crowds for pocket change.”

“Someone is getting _sassy_ ,” the Blue Paladin remarks as his companion rolls her eyes expressively—at which one of them, though, Lotor is not entirely sure. “And we’re getting to it, Prince Pretentiousness, hold your delicately pressed pants.”

“You two,” Lotor notes with what he thinks is admirable calm. “Are the ones who stated that we are laboring under significant time constraints.”

“Flyboy,” the girl says quietly, and the Blue Paladin settles down. “So, yeah, we’re going to hook you up to an experimental neural coms device and collectively pray it doesn’t scramble your brain like an egg on a hot sidewalk and then light candles to any god listening that you are able to unfuck whatever horror show is going on inside Allura’s brain.” She waves her hands in a vague gesture that manages to encompass everything. “That’s the plan. Sum total. Try not to fuck it up.”

It was, quite frankly, an astonishingly insane plan. The sheer breath of reckless abandon to it stole Lotor’s breath away—more than the oxygen depleted atmosphere of the Castle’s prison block, anyway. For several long breaths he can only stare at the Green Paladin, thoroughly dumbfounded by her complete lack of regard for the well-being of herself or anyone else on the ship.

“I beg your pardon,” he asks, quite convinced that he hasn’t heard her correctly.

She waves one hand. “This isn’t a difficult plan to grasp, Prince Sparkle Pants,” she says with one hand on her hip. Her compatriot grins at Lotor, showing all his teeth. “Are you in or are you out?”

“Note,” says the Blue Paladin. “That ‘out’ isn’t really an option for you. Because then you, me, Pidge here and my favorite girl—and as far as I can fucking tell— _your_ favorite girl, Allura, are all hyper fucked if you say no.”

Lotor frowns at him.

“What Lance means to ask in a non-stupid manner if he was at all capable of such a thing, but sadly he is not,” the Green Paladin cuts in. “I think he was dropped on his head as a small child and it somehow permanently fucked over the neural synapsis marked ‘How Not To Be A Total Jackass’ so, really if you think about it, we should pity the poor thing—anyway, what he means to ask is! Will you hook yourself into this neural device that is in no way sketchy and do a brain-dive to bring back Allura and not die?”

“Oh, you can totally die!” the Blue Paladin interjects making Lotor blink. “But not before you bring Allura back.”

“And if I fail?” Lotor asks.

“I shoot you.”

“And if I refuse,” Lotor asks, though he is almost entirely certain he knows the response.

“I shoot you.”

“And if I come back from the mind-dive and Allura does not?” Lotor ventures.

“I shoot you! Twice!”

“I am sensing,” Lotor drawls as one eyebrow tries to jump towards his hairline completely without any input from him. “A particular theme.”

The Blue Paladin sighs and presses a hand over his heart. “It would fill me with great and abiding joy to shoot you, it really, really would. So, if you can somehow arrange that to happen—ideally by continuing to be the glorious fuck up that you are—I would deeply appreciate it.”

The Green Paladin punches him right where, if Lotor’s somewhat vague understanding of human anatomy was correct, his kidneys are, pauses as if in deep thought, and then smacks him lightly upside the back of his head. “Focus, flyboy,” she chides. 

He gives her a little shrug. “Just sayin’.”

Lotor sighs. “You do realize,” he says once the pair of them pay attention to him. “That if I fail I, too, will be a vessel for whatever entity we seem to have roused from the white hole?”

“Yep,” says the Blue Paladin, making the ‘p’ on the word pop obnoxiously. Lotor resists the urge to grind his teeth with monumental effort. “But if we sit here with our collective thumbs up our collective asses trying to play tiddlywinks with our shameful bits then Allura will definitely become an Emissary for the Outer Dark and rip all our brains out our eye sockets. So, we’re taking our chances.”

It is, Lotor supposes, a fair summation of their current situation. (the boy is never fair)

He looks round his tiny cell with its pale furniture against the pale walls lit only by pale and uncertain light and nods slowly. “We are all,” he says heavily. “Taking our chances where we find them. Hand me the neural coms device.”

“Well, aren’t you a melodramatic beauty,” the Blue Paladin says nonsensically, but he unfurls himself from his sprawled seat at the Green Paladin’s side and slides the crown of wires over Lotor’s head. 

Lotor finds himself holding still, breath caught between his teeth and the boy settles the device over his temples, careful with his ears, with his hair, gentle with him in a way that Lotor had not expected. He’s not sure what to do with the delicate handling and it makes something hot, embarrassed and just this side of hateful flare in his chest. He wants to snap and snarl at the way the boy’s hands smooth over the crown of his head and carefully settle the device against his skull without pulling a single hair.

“Are you quite finished?” He asks, snappish to cover over the unsettled feeling curling in his gut.

That does get him a short, sharp hair tug. “All done, fussy,” the boy says. “Time to lay back and think of England.”

“ _Lance_ ,” the Green Paladin says, scandal and laughter riding her tone making it clear that he was making some sort of esoteric joke at Lotor’s expense.

Lotor sneers at him. “I am quite certain I have no idea what a historical nation-state of your tiny little planet has to do with our current situation,” he says, and the boy smothers his laughter with one hand—something hot and infuriated floods through Lotor at the speed of light. “And besides, it is Allura that you probably want me to be thinking of.”

The boy threads his hand through hair at the base of Lotor’s neck and fists it there, pulling Lotor backwards across his cot. “I really don’t give a single vomit-riddled fuck what happens to you,” he says, his hand an unforgiving anchor at the base of Lotor’s skull. “Just bring her home.”

Lotor opens his mouth to respond with something snide and cutting when the Green Paladin apparently decides to cut short their posturing and activate the device and Lotor’s entire world goes dark and still.

///

The world comes back in fragments.

He regains his sight long before any of his other senses. A fact that makes him wonder at himself. Senses are, largely, the figments of imagination in this realm of subconsciousness—the mind’s attempt to make sensible and controllable the unstable terrain of the mindscape, that unreal dimension of psionic power untouched by the laws of physics. The fact that Lotor sees long before anything else says something about him that he’s uncertain he wishes to explore in any sort of depth.

(can’t trust it until he can see it)

Allura stands on the far edge of a meadow filled with flowers of which he’s only ever read descriptions. Wide pink flowers with three sharp triangle petals shot through with thick white veins form a lush carpet that muffle his steps as he walks towards her. 

She’s a small dark figure, slim and fierce, dwarfed by a raging storm of cloying oil-slick darkness that rises in the horizon like a distant storm. Fragments of a poem, all a piece and unbidden spring to mind upon his approach: _nur Erde solle zur Erde warden_. 

(only earth should return to earth, well and true, but just how much of either of them was of dust and soil?)

“Allura,” he calls, voice unsteady and unsure in this liminal space.

She half turns, her eyes sweeping over him dark and thoughtful. “You’re late,” she says, mildly as if reflecting upon a particularly interesting math problem. “We are running out of time.”

“So I am given to understand from your paladins,” he says calmly. He catches hold of his unease and rising dread and throttles them stillborn in his heart. There is no room for emotions in this tremulous space of their minds. “We are, as they say, working against a strict deadline. Emphasis on _dead_.”

Allura laughs, a tiny sputter of sound, and the distant storm beats hot and sickening in the distance. Something massive and multi-limbed is briefly backlit by a burst of lightening, an arch of shivering energy, within the heart of that pulsing mass of madness. In the far distance he hears something that might be the beginning beats of a song.

Allura presses a hand to her mouth hard enough to turn the skin around it pale. 

“Might I make a suggestion, Princess?” He asks, observing decorum more for his own sense of control and balance than for any sense of respect for her long dead office. At her tiny, nearly unperceivable nod he makes a small gesture towards the creeping storm. “Try control your feelings. Tightly.”

She blinks at him, the corner of her mouth twitching up for a moment before smoothing back down into a composed line. “Noted,” she replies, and that is as much an invitation as he thinks he’s going to get.

“Where are we?” He ventures to ask as he comes to stand shoulder to shoulder with her, staring out across the meadow of gently bobbing pink flowers. 

“You don’t know?” She asks, then gives a little shrug—a bare suggestion of movement around the shoulders. “Doesn’t matter really,” she says, and her voice is so perfectly blank that he can only imagine the deep well of grief. “A place that I knew when I was small.”

The storm ripples outward, eats the distance between them at unreal speeds, and Lotor catches her hand in his. “I suggest we adjourn to a less emotionally laden location,” he says, voice tight. “Perhaps an area of a more recent vintage?”

(he can no better withstand her grief than his own)

Allura twists her hand in his until they clasp each other palm to palm and turns to flee. He wants to shout that running makes no difference, they are trapped within their very minds, they can simply imagine themselves somewhere else. But she gives him no chance, pulls him after her like a little child, and runs with all the speed her long legs give her.

The storm gives chase with a cry of some great and mutated creature—the sound wavering between the call of deep sea beasts and some ancient predator. Lotor cannot help the shiver that moves down his spine at double time. He dares not look back, merely plunges forward through the clinging vines of the flowers—grown long, monstrous, and grasping—after Allura, eyes fixed on the banner of her hair.

She grips his hand tight, strength crushing, before taking a sharp left turn as if they’d just come up against some invisible wall and pulls him along, resuming her break-neck speed. Vines grow to towering highest, tendrils reaching out to grasp at their clothing, catch in their hair, and Allura shoves past them. She punches her hand through a rotting hedge, the slick smell of decay dense around them, and yanks open a door—the shriek of tearing metal splitting the air.

The light goes odd and soft around them, refracts as if caught by crystal or a bubble, and sound mutes into a dull whisper slithering against his ears. 

As suddenly as the sensation gripped them it vanishes—releases them as if they’d tumbled through a barrier. The world tilts upon its axis, spins them like warped mirror, and Lotor stumbles against Allura, smacking into her back as she comes to a sharp stop. She grabs at his arm as they breath heavily, and they clutch each other like frightened children for several long moments.

Lotor jerks hard before he can stop himself. They stand in the middle of a long hallway, lights flickering uncertainly down its dim length and royal brocade peeling from the walls under its own weight.

“What is this place?” Allura asks quietly—hushed as if in a library. Or a morgue. 

He gives a sharp, coughing laugh before he can stop himself. “The libraries upon my father’s dreadnaught. I spent many an hour hiding in its forgotten corridors.”

Allura makes a low thoughtful noise in the back of her throat and gently untangles herself from his clutching fingers. Lotor pulls himself back, tucks his hands into the folded crooks of his elbows and fights not to curl in around himself. It’s not a place he ever thought to find himself, not even in the fragmented recreation from his memories. A rising unease fills him like nausea to watch Allura walk down the shadowed halls.

“Were they always neglected so?” She asks softly. “Or is it a trick of memory that makes them thus?”

It’s a clever question, one poised to reveal far more than he intends depending upon his answer. When she turns to glance back at him, a small smile curving her lips, he knows that she knows and is pleased with herself about it. It’s a cleverness so sharp it stands poised to cut itself and he finds himself left near breathless at the beauty of her, the viciousness of her mind.

For half a heartbeat, one long drawn in breath, Lotor thinks he may not mind if she peels open his walls to study what she might find inside. 

(he minds)

He tilts his head as he considers the question, the tell overdone and too dramatic for her not to realize it for what it is, and then sighs. “It has been so long since I have walked these halls that I cannot tell you an answer and be sure of its veracity,” he replies. “Though one might argue that the literal truth of a thing matters not in this particular space.”

She makes a face at him. “That is a politician’s answer,” she says, but accusation is absent from her tone.

Lotor spreads his hands. “Am I not a politician at the heart of me,” he asks with a smile he knows is edging towards obnoxious. He’ll blame that on the Blue Paladin’s influence, should any accuse him. “Even an emperor seeks to serve his people.”

The look Allura shoots him is so dry it could cause the desertification of a water world from a lightyear out. She balls one delicate fist and shakes it him warningly. “That does not answer the question of ‘why are we _here_ ’.”

Lotor looks down the hallway with its peeling brocade, moldering paintings—affectations of a forgotten age—and fading paint and gives a little twitch of one shoulder. “I think,” he says slowly and with difficulty. “Because my subconscious mind was trying to shield me. It was a place I loved a great deal when I was young. A place I felt safe.”

Allura makes a low, thoughtful sound and considers him from under her eyelashes. He would have expected pity or at least muted horror at the implications, but instead she looks at him as if he’s handed her an interesting, half-solved puzzle. He runs his tongue along the backs of his teeth and crooks an eyebrow at her. 

“Interesting,” she says and something about her tone makes his skin itch. She turns and continues down the hallway before saying over one shoulder. “I never would have guessed the empire to have moments of nostalgia. Libraries are rather _démodé_ in an age of quantum-entanglement communication, are they not?”

He sputters for as long as it takes her to reach the end of the hallway. She stands at the far end, door held open with one hand, and an expression that suggests that she would be grinning like the cat that caught the canary if they weren’t both trying so very hard to control every emotion they had. He stalks towards her and looks down his nose at her once he’s reached her, subtly crowding her against the doorframe. Allura’s smile widens. He suspects the possibility of dimples.

“Certain things,” he says with all the dignity he can muster. “Never go out of style, Princess.”

“Thus the elderly always tell themselves,” she says breezily. “Do you also rant at children who stumble across your lawn, Emperor?”

He frowns at her. “I am entirely certain that I understand precisely none of what you just said.”

She pats his arm sympathetically but declines to explain herself. He would continue the argument but finds himself at a sudden loss for words as he steps across the threshold. His mother’s libraries, her books and notes and little oddities spill across the uncertain space of the room—edges as hazy as his memory. 

Allura sweeps past him, as certain in her right to be there as any queen. She trails fingers along the old wood of the low work tables, across the spines of long forgotten texts, and turns over artefacts that refuse to hold their form in her long-fingered hands. “You loved this place,” she comments.

Lotor does not respond. (she requires no confirmation) 

He follows her as she wanders deeper into the memory, shadows filling in the spaces that he forgot. If those shadows writhe with their own intelligence, neither of them comments upon it.

Whatever internal map Allura follows as she wanders the high stacks—their upper reaches twisting into a rippling darkness—she does not deign to share. Lotor can only keep pace with her, offering small commentary when she holds out some small, irrelevant object that—in her small, fine-boned hands—warps itself into something of deep and surprising significance when he looks at it.

There is only so much of this that Lotor can bear, having her literally ruffle through his mind as if it were a forgotten chest in some small closet.

(he cannot stand to be her afterthought)

“Princess,” he says after she presents him yet another object whose form slowly slides into that of a small, unremarkable knife Zethrid had once found and used to peel fruit. “Are you certain that we have the time for you to browsing through the dregs of my memories like an heiress looking for a new evening gown.”

She turns a winsome smile on him. “Well,” she replies. “I do like shiny things, but that is not what I am doing here.” She pauses to pull down another book, turn it over briefly and then reject it on some rubric she’s not bothered to explain. “I’m looking for whatever it is your mind thinks is a weapon hidden here.”

Lotor gives into the urge to rub two fingers along the bridge of his nose. “As interesting and clever an idea as that is,” he says. “That is not at all how mind-war works.”

“And you, naturally, are a master of the art, as you are with everything else?” There’s a bite to her words, a bit of mockery. If forced to place money down on what the object of her ridicule actually was: he’d have to say herself. Something about that fact makes parts of his heart ache. 

He gives a little shrug. “I’ve studied the theory. Some.”

She gives him a long, searching look and then turns to wander deeper into the library. The shadows herd him after her. “Well,” she says after several moments of silent pacing. “Theory is better than half remembered fairy tales. What’s this?”

‘This’ turns out to be Narti. 

Narti small and fragile and young in ways she’s not been in centuries. Narti hung suspended in one of Haggar’s cyropods for study. The way he had first found her when he’d been too small to reach the locks without a box to stand on. He swallows hard.

“Narti,” he says, voice catching rough and ragged on the edges of her name. (her blood on the floor had been a shocking bright and brilliant blue) “A friend, once.”

Now Allura does look sad. She places a hand against the cool dome of the ‘pod and sighs. “So much for a less emotionally charged locale,” she comments blithely. “Who was she to you?”

Lotor fights not to snarl at her. “It’s not like you,” he says in the tatters of his dignity, “to pretend at ignorance. You knew her. You fought her. On Puig. In the instillation where the remains of the teladuv were housed. You—” 

He bows forward with the sudden surge of pain that streaks through him. Eyelids twitching madly, fingers scrambling, Lotor drags in breath to scream only to find his lungs seizing. He chokes on air. Every synapse fires at once as if someone decided that a switch triggering each and every one at their highest setting needed to be flipped. The world flares around the edges and then mutes to an odd grey.

///

The Blue Paladin is nearly nose-to-nose with him when Lotor opens his eyes.

The crown digs into his temples and he’s got the unsettlingly feeling that he’s been screaming for a very long time. The Blue Paladin swipes a cloth under his nose, eyes narrowed in something that might be considered concern. “What did we say about dying, Prince Pretentiousness,” the boy asks quietly. “Pretty sure we gave you clear instructions on that front. Do you need them written down? Embroidered maybe? Hunk does a mean French knot. I’m sure we could work something out.”

“Flyboy,” the Green Paladin chides, and the boy subsides. She eyes them over the top of her laptop. “Maybe we should pull the plug on this little experiment.”

Both he and the Paladin voice their protests in such shrill unison that Lotor cannot help but cringe. His voice layers over the Blue Paladin’s in horrible symphony. They eye each other with mutual disdain—though Lotor’s sure that he cuts a less than intimidating figured flat on his back and slowly leaking blood from his nose. The boy sneers at him and swipes again at the blood that slides down Lotor’s face, hands surprisingly gentle. 

“Lance,” the girl sighs. “I’m pretty sure screaming, bleeding from the nose and eyes, and blowing every single light in the cell block are all considered bad signs. We don’t need _two_ devotees to whatever eldritch horror is currently chewing on Allura’s mind.”

The boy rocks back on his heels and eyes Lotor. “What do you say, Prince? Wanna punch out?”

“It was my understanding,” Lotor says once he gets his vocal cords to stop doing their rendition of a chainsaw on speed through a petrified forest. “That if I failed in this particular task that you would shoot me.”

The boy nods sagely. “Yeah, that’s a thing I said.”

“Is it a condition that still stands,” he asks out of morbid curiosity. The inside of this boy’s head must be a bizarre curio shop run by a mad curator of macabre whimsy. 

Lotor gets a smile in response that shows entirely too many teeth to be reassuring.

“ _Lance_ ,” the Green Paladin sighs. “Stop that.”

The boy waves one hand airily. “Fine, fine. No, the condition does not stand,” he says in mocking formality, “but mostly because our resident geniuses think that they can maybe switch the Castle’s quintessence needs from Allura to you and we need a back-up battery. Aren’t you reassured!”

“Beyond measure,” Lotor answers drily. He scrubs a hand over his face and thinks of Allura standing small and fierce and unbowed before the storm of seething horror overtaking her mind. “However, I cannot abandon this task.”

This gets him twin looks of re-assessment, as if he were a yupper that has done a particularly surprising trick. They then confer with one another entirely in wiggling eyebrows and miniscule flicks of their fingers. 

“Right!” The boy says cheerfully. “We’re doing this. This is a thing we are continuing to do.”

Lotor opens his mouth to protest the particular inanity of that statement when the Green Paladin cuts the world out on him once again. 

///

When Lotor returns to himself, he finds himself curled around Allura, head pillowed on her lap with her fingers combing through his hair. Her voice is a wordless croon of comfort. “It’s getting smarter,” she says. “Learning.”

“No,” he corrects as he drags himself into an inelegant seat. “It’s just that it’s starting to notice us.”

Allura hums wordlessly, just a noise to take up space in the middle of the conversation while she thinks.

Lotor shakes out his hair looking down to study his hands where they tremble in his lap. The few texts he’d managed to salvage from his mother’s forgotten workspaces on psionic activity, mind-war, were few and their explanations couched in vague and unsettling analogies. He tilts his face up to stare at the slow undulations of the shadows that constituted the ceilings of the dreadnaught’s half-remembered libraries. 

Lotor wonders if those shadows were the result of his own patchwork memory, or the slow psychic contagion of the elder presence pressing against the edges of their minds.

“I didn’t ask,” Allura says suddenly. “Who she was. I asked who she was to you. That is, I think, an entirely different question.”

It _is_ a different question. A far more dangerous one. He thinks briefly of playing the question off. Asking if she is jealous to be prying so, but the deception would ring false and too obvious—it would give away more than it concealed. He wishes he could hate her for the way she crafts her questions into scalpels. Even deflections leave him sheered of his defenses.

He sighs without thinking and then frowns at the obvious tell. “She was my first friend,” he says after the silence grows long and dangerously weighted. “I found her as a … specimen in Haggar’s study. She was my first act of rebellion.”

That Haggar had found a way to corrupt Narti’s mind. Found away to use her against him was a new and terrible violation. (her death at his hands was a wound that would never stop bleeding)

Allura does not ask what happened to Narti. He thinks that for all his defenses and careful control over his every gesture, she finds him an easy book to pull open and read at her leisure. She runs one finger along his arm and sits in uncomfortable, thoughtful silence.

He watches the roiling darkness eat several shelves of books and wonders if he has begun to babble obscene insanity in his little cell the way that Allura has in her medical confinement. 

“She was your shield,” Allura says. He notes with distant interest that the shadows stop, pull back like a receding tide, as she speaks. “She was your first armour and Haggar cracked something in you when she broke Narti.”

Lotor wants to curl into himself and shudder at the words. But they live in a dangerous, liminal space where each emotional expression could be weaponized against them. “Yes,” he whispers. It takes several swallows—the mechanics of which fascinate him in some academic manner; this was an entirely conceptual space and yet the demands of his body required expression whether he thought of them or no—before he can find his voice. “I do not think it was coincidence that the witch found a way to corrupt Narti. It—” he waves one hand through the air in front of him, “it was a wedge between us all.”

Allura runs a thumb over his knuckles and sighs. “It is a terrible talent she has—the ability to find what hurts the most and exploit it.”

Something in Allura’s tone, in her choice of words jogs some half-remembered passage from his mind. “She was my armour,” he repeats, the thought hovering just out of his grasp. “Armor—cloak, crown, center, staff.”

“If that is a poem,” Allura says, tone gone dry and ironic. “I suggest you hire an editor.”

“No, no,” he says and rolls onto his feet. The shadows press in tight; they only have few scant feet worth of distance between them and the oblivion of the abyss. “I think. I think I remember what we need to do, but we cannot stay here.”

Allura allows him to drag her to her feet, expression bemused and tolerant. “And how do you suggest we flee?”

Lotor looks down the long corridor of half remembered bookshelves and writhing shadows. He blows out a long breath and tightens his grip on her hand, gratified when she clutches his hand with equal strength. “We run.”

It is, he reflects in that still and cold part of his mind that never stops cataloguing his surroundings, a particularly surreal experience to flee inside one’s own head. Lotor feels the burn in his lungs, the ache in his legs, the way Allura’s hand slides in his. He hears his own ragged breathing in his ears as he pants for breath. 

And yet he knows all of this is merely the figment of his imagination—his mind attempting to make sense of the neural link and strange unreal space created by their psionic connection. 

None of this is _real._

He draws up short, stops suddenly enough that Allura barrels straight into his back with a small _whoof_ of breath. Lotor bites back a laugh and shakes his head.

Lotor dreams himself a door. Perfectly serviceable, a bit drab, hanging in the empty space of the void that writhes with an alien intelligence. Allura tightens her grip on his fingers until he can feel the bone ache alarmingly. He pulls open the door and light spills out around them.

The world tilts on some unknown axis—alarming and disorienting—before resolving itself to a new hallway lit erratically with tall windows and tilting candelabra. Lotor looks up at them with bemused irritation. He’d hated them as a child and finds that time has not shifted his opinion.

Allura looks around with open curiosity. “Is this Arrakis?” 

Lotor hums his agreement and pulls her along behind him. “Don’t gawk,” he says. “Makes you look like a tourist.”

Allura sputters out a little laugh and something wet and slithering explodes through one dark window, showering them with slivers of glass and oozing matter. They both regard writhing mass with as much cool disinterest as they can both manage. His skin crawls with effort to not vomit. 

“Right,” Allura says slowly. “Feelings.”

“Apparently, if we are to survive we must be both secretive,” he says with the same measured control. “And emotionless,” he can’t help the slow arch of one brow. “I believe I may have found my _métier_.”

She punches him, not lightly, in the side. “Don’t be smug.”

It’s a fight not flinch, and he’s pleased with himself when he doesn’t. Catching her hand before she can try it again, he pulls her into side room and runs his fingers along the wall, following a thin seam. 

“How do you hide a secret inside your own mind,” he asks the air. “You hide it where you feel safest. You hide it with a friend.”

“Are you going share with the rest of the class,” Allura asks mildly, though he can see her hands curl into fists and he takes a careful step away from her. “Or are you going to continue to be vague uncommunicative?”

“It is a natural inclination,” he replies lightly, teasing just a little to see her roll her eyes at him. “Reinforced through experience—truly the debate between nature and nurture in this particular regard is a circular one.” Lotor’s fingers find the catch in the seam, a subtle click and the distinctive ozone scent of a dematerializing energy projection tells him that he’s found his quarry. He steps away as the wall slides into itself with a whisper of sound. “But I believe we are at the show portion of the evening rather than the tell.”

She eyes him not unkindly and then shakes her head. “You’ve been spending too much time with Lance.”

“Any time with your Blue Paladin is too much time,” Lotor returns. 

Allura’s lips quirk but she does not deign to respond as she follows him down into the silence and the dark. There is, if Lotor were inclined toward poetic fits of whimsy, a metaphor for their relationship in that. It catches at the edges of his heart, the careless way Allura hands over her trust to him as if there was nothing easier—it terrifies him in a deep and nameless manner that he refuses to inspect too closely.

Hundreds of tiny lights flicker into existence as they make their slow descent. They pulse together like a heartbeat, like the rhythm of a song, steady and reassuring as Lotor walks down and down and down. Allura tilts her head to watch them, runs curious fingers along them, and seems wholly delighted in their existence. 

It takes them a very long time to come to the end of the spiraling silver and black stairwell.

 _It’s an Outside Context Problem,_ Narti says from where she sits so small and so young on a low divan that they’d stolen from one of the forgotten ballrooms. It’d been one of the first things he’d ever stolen for her. He’d learned subterfuge and redirection for her. And here she sits, poised and perfect, to teach him yet again. 

Allura gasps softly, to hear Narti speak so clearly inside her head. Her voice is as sweet and cold as it ever was, like a high mountain stream. _You know how that’s normally illuminated._

“Yes,” Lotor says as if his heart wouldn’t very much like to rip itself out his mouth and flop around on the floor like a dying fish in agony. He takes all the pain and anguish at seeing her so pretty and so untouched, as if time never had any hold on her, and shoves it in a mental box. He settles next to Narti’s image and looks up at Allura. “The way the idea is framed goes as such: _’Imagine you are a tribe that lives on a largish, fertile island; you’ve tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors are cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself_ \--.”

“To wit: An Outside Context Problem is something that has heretofore been unanticipated either because of lack of capacity or lack of imagination,” Allura interrupts. “I’ve heard of the dilemma. ‘How do you solve a problem outside your context when all you have is your own cognitive frameworks?’ This entity is our OCP.” 

Narti tilts her head to the side and thrums her pleasure, low and vibrating in her chest. She is, Lotor thinks, the universe’s loveliest predator and he misses her terribly. _Indeed!_ she looks a Lotor and butts her head against his shoulder, short and hard. _I see why you like her. She’s clever._

“Narti!” He chides, laughter and humiliation running through him like fire. The walls pulse around them and something massive and feral screams in the far distance. 

_Control,_ Narti scolds. _You don’t have the time to be shy now._

Lotor ducks his head in acknowledgement and shrugs a little when she smacks his thigh with her tail. Narti tilts her head towards him, tiny ears pricking in his direction. She makes a deep _clack_ of disapproval and shoves him. _I can’t be the holder of your secrets forever_ , she tells him—ruthless in her objectivity. _I’m dead._

Lotor’s chest wants to cave in at that simple declaration. (something tiny and so young inside him lies down and _wails_ for grief)

He looks up to catch Allura watching the pair of them like an avid theatre goer. He gives a smile made of shattered glass and bleeding edges. “I am being,” he notes with a coolness that sounds like shock even to himself, “chided by a figment of my imagination.”

Narti makes another deep _clack_ of disapproval. _I am not a figment,_ she corrects pedantically, and he cannot for the life of him remember if that had been a quirk of her personality or if his own is slowly overwriting hers as his memory dissolves. _I am a ghost of memory. That’s entirely different._

“Of course, you are,” Allura soothes. She comes to sit on the other side of Narti. All easy grace and calm acceptance as if walking through a man’s memories of a dead girl were a thing done every other Tuesday. Nothing to comment upon, business as usual. She smooths down her dress over her knees. “So what secret is it that you are keeping?”

Narti smacks one shoulder into Allura’s clicking her claws together, a clear sign of her high spirits. _I keep all of Lotor’s secrets,_ she crows, the texture of her thoughts so pleased and so smug. _He hid them down here in the deep and the dark, with me to guard them,_ she runs dull claws through Lotor’s hair, scratching at the back of his skull, behind his ears. He tips his head to her ministration with thoughtless familiarity. _I have always guarded his heart._

Something about Narti’s words jogs his memory and she curls her tail around his ankle, encouraging. “Narti,” he says slowly. “She called you my armour. You say you guard my heart. There’s something I need to remember. What is it?”

It is surreal and yet fitting to ask a dead girl for hints to unlock his own mind. Who else would have the key to the lock but his dreaming dead? Narti butts her head against his shoulder again like she can sense his thought—though given that she is, literally, nothing more than an errant bit of his own mind deciding to sit up and talk back to him, Lotor supposes she _can_.

 _Morbid,_ she comments without judgement. 

“Don’t go digging around my head if you don’t like what you find there,” he tells her and the fights the urge to place a hand over his breast bone at the sudden surge of pain. (their back and forth, the easy banter, it’s so familiar it leaves bleeding gouges in his soul. he’ll never be free of the pain of missing her. doesn’t want to be)

Narti tips her chin towards him like a cat catching the scent of something small and tasty, _You are very stubborn,_ she says and her tone is beyond tired. _It is very stupid._

She holds up a hand to forestall any comment from himself or Allura. She chitters her claws together, the sound like a thousand mice scrabbling against the walls and rolls her slopping shoulders. _You already know about the cloak, the staff, the crown, the center,_ she says and the rebuke in her tone is a tangible thing. _You know about the inside and outside, about centering calm and the striking rage. You know._

If it’s a poem, Allura had said, it needs an editor. Well and true, he thinks. They had navigated once already by cave poetry and that brought them nothing but grief. Lotor isn’t certain he should trust in his own half buried memories of poetic tripe. But they’re here now and there’s nothing to be done for it but jump and trust they will learn how to fly on the way down.

Lotor stands to pace. If he cannot give into his own little physical tics of habit inside his own head, he reasons, he can’t anywhere. 

“Cloak,” he repeats. “It starts with that, doesn’t it?” He doesn’t wait for an answer or clarification. Both Allura and Narti tip their heads to the side in such an eerily similar display of interest that a shiver jumps down his spine in double time. “The ability to shield yourself—hide yourself. To be something different, something other than what you are.”

 _You are being repetitive,_ Narti chides. _And this is an Outside Context Problem._

Allura makes a faint humming sound in the back of her throat and then smiles when they both turn to look at her—she seems perfectly comfortable in the most hidden part of his head, trading banter with a memory of a dead girl. She makes a little flicking gesture with her fingers. “That’s right, isn’t it?” She asks. “We’ve been treating this entity like a beast, an invader, something with wants and desires that we understand.”

Narti makes a deep thrumming noise of approval. _Yes! Something to fight, something to defend against, something to pull apart and analyze. All things within your context._

Allura nods slowly and then looks up at Lotor. “What if we don’t fight it?”

Lotor stares at her dumbly, mute with horror. “We, what, let it take over?”

She shrugs, dainty and demure. “Let it move through us?” She suggests. “Stop treating it like an invader to be fought, but something to be channeled.”

He knows he’s heard this suggestion before though he cannot imagine where. The idea scratches at him, digs at him, and he shakes his head in mute denial. It’s in his mother’s notes. He knows it is. Some turn of phrase, some fragmentary idea she jotted on the margins of a paper never to be published. Lotor dreams himself a bookcase—heavy framed and even then, creaking under the weight of the piled tomes. He dreams himself twenty bookcases. He’d dream himself a million if he thought it would help.

Neither girl comments as he yanks book after heavy book off their shelves, riffling through them at unreal speeds. Lotor’d half expected Allura to stand and join him in his search, but she seems content to sit on the divan with Narti, legs swinging like a schoolchild. He thumbs through text after text, scanning heavy pages for the phrase he knows will jog his reluctant memory.

(why the reluctance he does not know. cannot)

He’s pulled most of the books from one bookcase from their shelves and left them discarded and forgotten at his feet before he moves onto the next one. A nameless sense of foreboding pushes him along as firm as a hand between his shoulder blades, a voice at his ear, and he drags the next book down with a near frantic fervor. He discards it just as quickly and anxiety spirals upwards from the pit of his stomach until it sits fat and heavy in his mouth.

Allura makes a disgusted sound. “Oh, for the love of small gods,” she sighs. “This obsessive self-reliance is foolish and insulting.” She stands and pulls a book from the shelf without looking at it. It’s a small, slim, little thing in her hands and she doesn’t look at it. “You know the suggestion to be a bad one because your mother tried it and that’s how Honevra, the brilliant Altean alchemist, became Haggar, the empire’s fearsome witch.”

She tosses the book over her shoulder without a glance and cocks her head. 

“How,” he tries to snarl. They come out a desperate and confused gasp, the words clawing out of his throat. “How do you--? You _cannot_.”

“I know it,” Allura says, beyond all manner of gentleness. “Because you know it.”

Lotor snaps his head to Narti who cocks her head in the same dainty little predatory gesture. She opens her mouth to speak, jaw unhinging, the darkness of her gaping mouth a wet void, and Lotor recoils. Allura steps in front of him, cool as a winter breeze. A sound slips from Narti like a soft hiss of steam and a million streamers of light burst from her—a fire breather’s trick done with fireflies. Her mouth opens and opens and opens and air is full twinkling lights like bioluminescent algae on a beach. 

(it’s hideous and horrible and he’s never seen anything more beautiful)

Allura turns to him and he wonders if he’s concussed. He watches her hair spin in a gleaming arc, a heavy silver wave against the backdrop of golden light, watches her lips form words and never hears them.

///

“Did you know,” Ezor says from where she’s got her head pillowed against his thigh. “That our ability to remember shit is because of a _suuuuper_ ancient virus?”

Lotor makes an interested noise in the back of his throat before offering her another strip of dried meat. She nips it from his fingers as tidy as a baby bird. 

“It’s, uh, the result of—” she pauses to swallow heavily.

“Chew,” he advises her as he peels another strip from its casing. “Then swallow.”

“Nag,” she sings. “Like, we only remember things because of a tiny little protein called Arc, right?”

Lotor offers her another strip and she bites it clean in half, grin bright and a little feral. “I did do my assignments in the academy,” he says while she chews. “Some of us actually read from our books, rather than just doodling genitalia all over them.”

“Pretentious asshole,” she says, fond and affectionate. “Yeah, anyway, Arc is super weird as a protein. It actually sticks around, while the rest of proteins in our brains are, like, _bzzzipt!_ ” she makes a little hand gesture and grins at him again. “Gone in seconds, yeah? But _Arc_ , nah. Arc sticks around. And it encapsulates its RNA so it can, like, shoot it from one neuron to another.”

She opens her mouth, a million white teeth, each as sharp as a razor gleam up at him. He drops in the other half of the jerky and she chews, eyes going half-lidded with gastronomic bliss. 

“And this is because of a virus?”

“Viruses change us,” she says. Ezor rolls into a sloppy cross-legged seat across from him and leans forward, hands on his thighs. “We change viruses. They are these itty-bitty, teeny-tiny things that we can’t even _see_ and they can fuck us up. And we fuck them up all the time! And don’t even know it!”

“Ezor,” he sighs. “Why are you telling me this.”

Ezor pokes him in the nose. “You’re supposed to be the smart one, Prince! Why _am_ I telling you this? I’m just a figment of your imagination.”

Lotor starts and finally looks around. They sit on blanket on an endless beach, slate grey and entirely unforgiving. Waves roil in the background and he knows with the certainty that only comes in dreams that he would never reach the edge of the water even if he walked all day. 

“Free zone,” Ezor says. 

“Endlessly looping,” she says.

“You need to break it,” she says. “Or you are _hyper_ fucked.”

“Well,” Allura says. “She’s charming.”

“I am!” Ezor chirps before dissolving into mist that blows away on sea breeze.

“I miss her,” Lotor says as he watches the horizon. 

“I know,” Allura says, soft and sad. She pulls him to his feet, hands soft and gentle. Her eyes are cold as the death of stars and twice as old. “Where are we?”

“Free space,” he says and makes a vague gesture. (it might be a little obscene) “Endlessly looping. You broke in,” he notes as he finally focuses upon her. “Do you know how to break back out?”

“Free space,” Allura echoes. “You do dream up the most fascinating things.”

Lotor shrugs helplessly, unsure of what she wants from him and suddenly endlessly exhausted. “We’re a virus,” he tells her as she tugs him down the shore after her. “We’re an infection in the system.”

“Morbid,” Allura says, echoing Narti, who is herself only an echo.

“No, no,” he says, tugging at her hand like a child after a school teacher who isn’t paying attention. “I mean—”

She spins on one heel and presses a finger to his lips. “I know,” she says, soft as secrets. “I know.”

She dreams them a door. (“I learned this trick from you,” she says. he’s unreasonably proud) And then another. And another. And another after that. Lotor follows after her, obedient as he never is in the waking world—more than a little in love with her cool eyes and causal ownership.

Allura tears open one door and startles backwards, coming face-to-face with herself. They both blink and for a moment the light refracts as if caught between a million crystals.

Lotor reaches around her and slams the door in her doppelgänger’s offended face.

“This is a space caught between memory and dreaming,” she tells him. “With all the hallmarks of neither.”

He blinks at her. Mute and dumb.

“ _We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity_ ,” she sighs as she turns away from him to stare at the sea gone suddenly black and inky with a great, hard to grasp, shadow moving beneath its heaving surface. “ _And it was not meant that we should voyage far_.”

That’s supposed to mean something, he knows, but he can’t quite follow the logic. She makes an irritated sound at him. For all the endless doors she’s dreamt them, they still stand on a slate grey beach with endless cloudy sky. Allura tilts her head to watch them streak across the horizon and sighs. She gives the sky a little salute—the gesture clearly stolen from someone else—and he wants to laugh at how ill it suits her. 

“I can apparently dream myself into here,” she says. “But I can’t dream us out. You need to let go, Lotor.”

He spreads his hands in helpless supplication. “I’m not sure I know how.”

Allura sighs, shoulders slumping, and then she waves a hand at beach. A staircase erupts from the sand like a serpent rising from the deeps, spiraling ever upwards—it rips towards the sky. He follows her as she races up it, her long legs eating the stairs two at a time. Something monstrous and slithering thunders after them and the stairs fall into an endless oblivion after their feet leave each one.

“ _Chaos_ ,” she shouts over her shoulder. “Once meant _void_ or _vast chasm_ in the Paladins’ language, did you know?”

The world stops.

They stand upon an endless field of grass, knee high and swaying in the breeze, and he knows this is not his dream.

“How do you know that,” he asks.

“I know it,” Allura says as if the fact were as plain as simple mathematics. “Because Lance knows it.”

At first, he thinks: _the lion bond_ , and then he thinks: _they are best friends_ , and then he thinks: _a retrovirus_. “It is changing us as we change it,” he tells her, certain in a way that he cannot explain. “We manifest psionic capacity in direct correlation with exposure.”

Allura smiles so deeply she dimples. “Correlation is not causation,” she sings, and his heart wants to seize at how close she sounds to Ezor’s teasing cadence. “But yes! Crown and cloak, center and staff. These all work when you are dealing with a sentience from four-dimensional space.” Allura cocks her head to the side, smiling so broadly her fangs show, dainty and grim. “You may need to adapt a bit for something that treats the entire concept of dimensions as a mere suggestion.”

Lotor makes a noise at the back of his throat that wants to be a denial when it grows up. 

The look she shoots him is amused and sly and he loves it on her. “You already figured that out,” she says. “You are so stubborn, it’s almost cute.”

He wants to protest that assessment, critique it in some fundamental manner, but Allura can see to the very heart of him as easily as breathing and he is helpless. “It defies explanation,” he complains. “The elements of mind-war are clear. You don’t even know them, and you want to throw them all away?”

Allura tips her head back and laughs and laughs. It’s a high bright sound that burns through him like the purest alcohol, leaving him giddy and uncertain. She flicks her fingers and a great endless maze springs up around them—hedges and crumbling stone, towering vines and fast-moving water—a labyrinth to trap the unwary. 

“I didn’t say abandon them,” she corrects as she folds the cuffs of the jacket over her wrists. The garment drapes over her, heavy and far too large upon her slender frame. “I said to adapt them.”

The labyrinth spills out before them, endlessly looping in on itself, each path forward moving two steps backward. 

Allura’s dimpled smile is beautiful, brilliant, and fractured at the edges.

(he always did have a type)

Lotor scowls at the primrose path that unfolds before them. Frowns at her new garment. Scowls even harder at the way she bites her lip and her eyes twinkle.

“I should have known,” he complains. “That you would pick that insane, infuriating child as your cloak—your right hand. I should have known.”

“He’s not fair,” she says and there’s something in her expression that is just this side of fae. “He tells lies with the truth. Says nothing at all with a million words. Never lets you see him coming until he’s already left you bleeding,” she knits her fingers together before stretching them out before her. “And he’ll always, always, always stand between me and the rest of the universe.”

It’s faith the lets her say that, Lotor knows. A deep and unshakeable faith that he envies like a drowning man envies air. “He’ll protect you from the world,” Lotor says instead.

“No,” Allura corrects, gentle and calm like the center of a growing storm. “He’ll protect the world from _me_.”

The labyrinth grows around them, a never-ending maze that always has Allura at its center—the beast in the fable, both maiden fair and monster terrible bound up in dusky skin and platinum hair. She fluffs her hair out the collar of the Blue Paladin’s jacket, letting it spill like a waterfall down her shoulders. She looks more comfortable in her skin than he has ever seen her.

“But he doesn’t see you clearly,” Lotor says and it’s not pettiness that drives him to say it. It’s the truth, or the drive to grasp at it, either way the result is the same. Allura turns to him, head cocked, lovely and terrible. “Neither of you see each other clearly. You can’t.”

“Of course not,” she agrees easily. “That’s not the cloak’s job, is it?”

She reaches up, slow and a little uncertain, to cup his face in both hands. There are trees swaying in the distance. He can see them over the top of her head. Lotor tips his chin forward into the cage of her hands, and she draws her thumbs over his cheeks, digging in just a little along the bone. He wants to say that he’d rip out his own heart and had it over to her, if that’s what she wanted, but they both know that’s only a pretty lie. 

(he’s a liar)

Lotor closes his eyes and sighs. “The crown for sight,” he says. “ _Not as one wishes things to be, like a child. Nor as another wishes them to be, like a fool. But as they are_.”

When he looks down at her he’s not even a little surprised to see his marks, glowing blue and sharp as ice, on her cheeks. “I look terrible in pink,” he tells her.

Allura laughs, reaches up on tip-toes, and presses a hard, chaste kiss to his lips. “You’ll survive,” she tells him. He fits his hands about her waist and waits. (he’s good at waiting) “Crown for sight,” she agrees. “For knowing when to wait and went to strike. When to hold your ground and went to run.”

“And every poet is shown to be a liar,” he says. “Love is supposed to be blind.”

She pinches him, and he slants her a crooked smile, refusing to react. “Because every kind of love is the same,” she says, sarcasm and humor alive in her face. “You know better than that.”

Allura fits inside the circle of his arms like a dream and if it weren’t for the howling storm of insanity that he can hear tear along the edges of the maze he’d think it was one of his (desperately, desperately rare) good dreams. He can almost believe that every road he had to follow would lead to her; that all his choices end with her, but neither of them have time for children’s stories and they had a mad god to tame.

He presses his forehead to the crown of her head, a shudder moving through him as the light grows dim and fractured. “This is a dream,” he tells her. 

She tilts her face to press cold lips to the side of his jaw. He can feel her growing smile. “Everything is a dream,” she tells him. “That’s the trick.”

Lotor half expects her to shatter into a flock of birds, dissolve into a million glittering lights, but she stands in his arms, sturdy and firm. Allura bites the corner of her bottom lip and arches one eyebrow at him, waiting for him to slot the puzzle pieces together.

He blinks. “It can only sense us in the dreaming.”

Allura taps his nose with one finger. “Give the boy a prize,” she sings. “It’s only paying attention because we existed, in the white hole for a moment, for a breath, in all the spaces it exists.”

“It’s _curious_ ,” he says, and chooses to ignore the way his voice soars alarmingly in decibels. “It’s killing us because it’s curious.”

“No,” Allura says, drawing out the vowel obnoxiously. He makes a face at her. She makes one back and then giggles. “It’s not killing us. It’s … changing us. Making us something new.”

(“A retrovirus!” Ezor chirps in his memory as she holds out one his mother’s datachips “multi-refractile genome sequencing”)

Lotor shudders. “The last something new it made is the greatest abomination our universe has ever known.”

Allura looks for a heartbeat impossibly sad before her expression firms. “I think it also engendered Voltron. Every time we touch the rift we walk away different.”

The shrill shriek of the storm sounds distant but no less dimmed. Lotor looks up to watch the labyrinth continue to unfurl like a blooming flower, Allura ever at its heart, pushing back the roiling oil-slick darkness. As one they step back from the edge. 

“This will not hold it forever,” he warns.

“No,” she agrees. “Cloak and crown are only two parts, are they not?”

Something squalls high and grating on the outer boundary of the maze, and Lotor watches with mute horror as swath of hedges explodes in a flurry of broken branches and a fountain of leaves. Allura rubs at her nose, smearing the fat drop of blood that slowly leaks from it. Her jacket has a rip down one sleeve.

The rage in her eyes is a feral thing—bright as a lightening strike and twice as deadly. It’s a twisting madness that he cannot understand, cannot begin to plumb the depths of. The air goes thick with the cloying smell of rot, glowing bits of moss climb over the walls of her labyrinth, lurid yellows and reds growing fetid and thick over the brick. Something like a skull erupts from one wall, flowers growing in a wild tangle from its unhinged jaw and vacant eye sockets. 

Allura tips her head back and screams. The world shivers around the edges, light guttering like a candle.

///

He’s flat on his back and not even out of his first century again. He can feel it in the way his joints ache and his limbs never seem to end where he expects them to.

Zethrid’s face pops into view, upside down and entirely too pleased with herself. Lotor scowls on instinct. She grins, neatly dodging his fist before wrapping one hand around it and yanking him to his feet like he weighed less than half a cupcake. He smooths down his jacket without looking at her. She ruffles his hair. He takes another swing.

Lotor finds himself face down on the floor again with his arm twisted up behind his back, Zethrid’s knee pinning him to the ground. “You are so easy to read,” she says in his ear. “When you’re all riled up and angry. Led around by the horns like little bleatbeast and twice as precious.”

(Zethrid and tact only ever had the most fleeting of relationships)

He snarls wordlessly and tries to shove himself up, twisting his hips to dislodge her. 

“Prince,” she sighs as she rolls with him, keeping him neatly pinned between her thighs. “It’s like you aren’t even trying.”

“You,” he pants, open-mouthed and exhausted after trying to move her mass. “Have hardly any room at all to critique me. Your rage is as subtle as an ocean storm.”

Zethrid laughs, loud and booming, thunder on the horizon promising a deluge. “If you always show them one thing,” she says. “Then they never expect you to do something different. Everyone expects my rage. They plan for it, count on it. And then!” Zethrid smacks a heavy fist into her palm. “You hit ‘em where it hurts.”

She rolls off him, surprisingly graceful for her bulk. Lotor pushes himself up to hands and knees, before flopping backwards into a graceless sprawl. He flips his hair out of his eyes. “Sneaky of you,” he comments.

She ruffles his hair. “Learned it from you,” she says. “Have to have control to hide in plain sight. Got to be calm to be this angry.”

Lotor blinks at her. “Oh,” he says.

“Oh,” Zethrid echoes, gently mocking. 

She opens a door in the floor, and without any ceremony at all, shoves him through it.

///

Lotor blinks the blood from his eyes and grabs Allura where she stands screaming fit to wake the dead.

He grips her arms tight and shakes her hard, once. 

“Control,” he chides, holding her fast as she writhes in his grip. “Whatever that was, tuck it away, lock it down. You are more than this.”

Allura breathes deep, eyes fluttering shut for a moment, and the world goes still and cold—like the hush a forest after the first snow, like the winter sun across the sea. 

There’s a deep knocking that sounds from the center of the maze as regular as a sleeping pulse. Allura laughs when he looks up to find it. “ _Shishi-odoshi_ ,” she says, the collection of syllables suggesting a word he’s never heard before. “Literally: ‘deer-scarer’. Shiro told me about them when he was trying to teach me to meditate. Focusing on the sound brings calm.” 

She fits a tactical belt across her hips and sighs out a breath. The stillness of the labyrinth is startling after endless dreams punctuated by the high, undulating shriek of entity’s madness. Allura tilts her head as she stares out across her maze. It’d stopped its ravenous expansion, but as Allura stands cool and distant, command written across her every feature, it flings itself outward with gleeful voraciousness. Allura runs a hand along her ravaged sleeve and it mends itself under her touch. She twitches the collar, so it lies to her liking and she slants him a thoughtful look from the corner of her eyes. His markings on her face burn cold and stern. He runs a thumb along one and she tips her cheek to his hand for a moment.

“Last is the staff to send darkness squalling back under its rock,” Lotor says. “Emotions crafted into a weapon to be wielded against your enemy, not against you.”

Allura blinks. “I’m not entirely sure I follow,” she says, tone guarded like she expects a trick question. “You just told me to keep my emotions locked in a metaphorical box.”

Lotor resists the urge to pace with monumental effort. “Yes,” he says, drawing the word out in a slow hiss. Something slithers just outside his peripheral vision—Allura twitches her fingers and it gives a small, plaintive yelp and dies. “The ones you cannot control. But the ones that drive you, motivate you, give you a fire to plant yourself in front of your enemies and make godforsaken mess? Those we can use.”

Allura twitches a smile at him and gives him a little salute. Her eyes go dark and his marks burn on her skin like a brand. Lotor can sketch a hypothesis about what makes the rage flicker in her eyes. The knocking of the _shishi-odoshi_ booms like the thunder, a singular alarm that Allura’s center was tipping dangerously.

He expects the world to tip, for it to shutter around him like a dying beast. (he wonders if he will see Axca next—aches with wanting) But the labyrinth continues to coil in upon itself in ceaseless repetition. Lotor sighs out the breath he’d held caught between his teeth, shoulders slowly unknotting.

He jostles her until she tilts her head slowly to stare at him, eyes wide and fixed on something he cannot see. “Control, Princess,” he reminds her. “Control your anger.”

“I am far past _angry_ ,” she whispers. 

(Zethrid laughing, fangs bared, head tipped back. “you have to be controlled to be this angry”)

“Then control your rage,” he says. “You use it. Or it will use you.”

She closes her eyes and does one of those full body shudders, as if someone had walked over her grave. (that someone being a chaos god older than time) The knocking of the _shishi-odoshi_ goes back to its gentle, slow rhythm and Allura opens her eyes. 

“This may be more difficult than anticipated,” she says.

He runs a thumb over his marks on her cheek. “Be someone who can think through their rage. Someone who runs cold as ice at their core,” he gives her a small, obnoxious smile, “unfortunately you shot yourself in the foot, choosing that infuriating child as your cloak. He’s so naturally gifted at being a staff.”

That makes a delighted smile stretch across her face until she dimples with it, fangs peeking out, small and dainty. “To you, perhaps,” she says. “Have you been hate-flirting with my Paladin?”

Lotor splutters out a denial that makes her laugh. He huffs a sigh as she continues to snicker. It’s a sign of her growing control that her amusement does not cause the labyrinth to disrupt. Instead, the endless infinite of trailing vines and towering hedges all burst into radiant bloom. He plucks one fat rose that drips from a skull’s trailing jaw and offers it to her. 

“Would he even recognize it?” He asks. Allura takes the rose and runs it over her lips with a sly look. “I do wonder at his mental capacity, or lack thereof.”

Allura rolls her eyes. “You can’t hate-flirt via me,” she says. “I refuse.”

Lotor makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “I am not,” he says with all the offended dignity he can muster. “Hate-flirting. The entire concept is ridiculous.”

Allura hums low in her throat and spins to walk away from him. The knee-high grass is back, thick and waving in a wind he can’t sense, and the labyrinth takes the form of hidden paths cut into is golden depths. The insistent knocking of the _shishi-odoshi_ continues like metronome. Trees sway in the distance, each leaf reflecting vast worlds he can only guess at.

He looks down and finds a sleek gun in his hands—a sniper’s weapon, long-barreled and mounted infrared sights. (for all the boy’s endless foolishness, his blood runs with ice water and he never hesitates) Lotor raises it to his shoulder and looks through scope.

She turns back look at him—form mutating endlessly, vines growing along her veins, flowers curling from her ears. The marks are gone, swept blank, like a canvas left unfinished. It smiles at him with Allura’s dimples and fangs and he wishes he could hate it.

“What gave me away,” it asks. 

“Her questions,” he tells it kindly. “They are always far more subtle. Even saying nothing reveals something.”

It nods as Allura’s skin falls away, flaking off like a serpent shedding its skin. He pulls the trigger and Allura’s fist punches straight through the thing’s head, shattering it like a melon meeting concrete. She rips the Green Paladin’s little fist weapon through its skull and her grin is sharp with feral pleasure.

“You,” she hisses to it. “You could not hope to mimic me.”

It turns, the split halves of its gleaming skull flop on its neck like so much meat. It makes a sound that is only the merest suggestion of words. Each half grows a mouth—teeth first and then all the necessary apparati of speech—tongue, lips, vocal cords. “We learn through imitation,” it says. “Do we not?”

Lotor swallows hard against his nausea, and shoots it, three times, straight into center mass.

Allura steps over the writhing body and the grass ripples over it, rending it into nothing with a thousand insects’ teeth. Her eyes sweep over him, sharp and assessing, but says nothing about the gun in his hands. He feels obliquely the need to defend himself. 

He hefts it with one hand. “Your paladin is compensating for something,” he says. “With this.”

Allura gives him an unimpressed look. “We are running out of time,” she tells him, each word as crisp as a snapped vertebra. “Perhaps focus?”

The metronome of the _shishi-odoshi_ continues like clock, while the walls of the labyrinth spring up around them once again—forgotten hallways and abandoned streets running together to form network of defenses with Allura at the heart of them.

He raises the rifle again. She raises one eyebrow in his sights, cool as a winter morning, and he would know that expression anywhere.

“I had to be sure,” he tells her. “I’ve been fooled twice over now.”

She merely nods, she holds out one hand and he slots his fingers with hers—palm-to-palm. She pulls open a trap door revealing shadowed stairs that lead down into the silence and the dark. He follows her without comment—at this point words were fast becoming unnecessary.

They walk down a shadowed staircase for so long Lotor forgets, briefly, that he had ever done anything other than follow behind her, step after step, in the dark.

They reach a landing poised over a glittering darkness. The geometry of the space entirely wrong, sea and sky and void blending into endless twisted horizons. Acxa sighs and turns back to him.

“Aren’t you a little busy to be fucking around, Prince?” She asks him, and then shoots him pointblank in the head.

///

Lotor wakes up to Lance delicately blotting blood from his nose. He catches one slender wrist and tugs. 

“Woah, jeez, easy,” Lance says, carefully prying Lotor’s fingers from his skin. “I am not that kind of boy—well, I am, but not with you. Definitely not when you are bleeding from your nose and eyes again. And yeah, fuck, I think Pidge had it right when she said we should pull the plug on this little experiment of mine. Definitely not one of my more brilliant plans—”

“Send me back,” Lotor says and winces at the ruined sound of his voice, as if his vocal cords had gone through a blender. “I know what needs to be done.”

“Yeah,” Lance says, drawing out the word obnoxiously. “About that.”

Lotor turns his head. “Pidge,” he calls. The girl startles and looks at him with wide, impossibly young eyes over her laptop. “Please.”

“Prince,” she starts, wilts under his glower and then finds her reserves of steel. “Lotor, you were _dead_ for ten minutes. Lance sat on your chest and performed CPR until you coughed out a metric shit ton of pink petals and black shit and started breathing again.”

Lotor takes a moment to process this.

“Please,” he says.

Lance sighs. “My scale for This Is Fucked Up is, well, completely fucked,” he says to the far wall. His face is a strange mix of resigned, fatalistic, and amused. “I am definitely going to have a complete screaming meltdown about this later. Therapy. So much fucking therapy. But whatever you decide, Pidgeon.”

Pidge and Lotor stare at each other for a long time. What goes on behind the Green Paladin’s entirely too perceptive eyes, Lotor is not sure, but eventually, she heaves a massive sigh. 

She looks at her companion and Lance studies him again. Lance rakes a hand through his short hair. “I am going to regret this,” he says. “We are all going to regret this _so much_.” He squares his shoulders and sighs. “Drop him.”

The world goes dark.

///

Lotor wants to say he’s surprised when he opens his eyes and Allura’s peering down at him, worry lines gathering at the corners of her eyes. Her hair is a shining curtain hiding them the world. Lotor raises the gun to peer down the sights and she sighs.

“That didn’t exactly work out for you last time,” she says.

“But it did this time,” he responds, pleased. Lotor rolls up to an easy seat and frowns at the endless field of small pink flowers. The sky is a bright and cloudless blue and somewhere the metronome of the _shishi-odoshi_ sounds, steady as a sleeping heartbeat. “Are you sure this is wise?”

Allura shrugs. “I figured it out watching your dreams,” she says and waves a hand at the field of bobbing flowers. A soft wind whispers through them, calm and comforting. “Free zone, endlessly looping.”

She puts one hand to the ground and draws it up slowly—a wide basin on a short pedestal follows her fingers like a faithful hound. “I tried reaching you,” she tells him without reproach. “On the beach, when you were dreaming of Ezor, but it reached you first. “

Lotor groans. “I slammed the door in your face.”

“Yes,” she says, flashing him a grin so deep it makes her dimple charmingly. “That did not go according to plan at all.”

Lotor waves a hand at the endless field of flowers that surrounds them. “Did any of this?”

Allura rises to kneel before her basin and gives a small shrug—just a slight suggestion of movement. “Well, no. But it has been educational all the same.”

“Educational only if we survive this,” he remarks before joining her in her contemplation. “Otherwise its just a fool’s errand, like so many others.”

She reaches over the basin as it slowly fills with water and shoves him. “Try to contain your enthusiasm and outlandish optimism, Prince.”

Lotor’s not sure what to say to her, no longer sure at all where the line might be between them. Whatever familiarity (intimacy that he craves like drowning man craves air) he’d built, had been with a lie. The fact of it leaves him desperately wrong-footed and awkward. “What is this?” he asks instead, the deflection crude and artless. “A scrying bowl?”

Allura shoots him a look from under her lashes, contemplative and amused. Something in him unknots, some tension around the shoulders, and he arches a brow at her. (he could not tolerate her pity) “I learned a few tricks of my own,” she says. She smooths her hands over the surface of the water and it clears, warps, until it shows her own form, small and hunched, sitting inside a labyrinth. Allura sighs. “Should have guessed.”

Lotor’s fingers itch for the gun, to check one more time through the sights, as uncertainty rises like nausea. “That is an interesting party trick, Princess.”

She looks up and cocks her head to the side. “Back to formal titles,” she asks. There’s laughter under that question and his blood is a glacier. “And here I thought we’d moved as that.”

Lotor looks at her for a long moment unsure how to put into words the anxiety that grips him. “Were you watching the entire time?” He asks. He waves one hand, the gesture choppy and short, before he can contain himself. “At what point did you learn this particular trick?”

She sits back on her heels to study him, her face curiously blank. She lifts her hands to draw her thumbs over her cheekbones. “About in time to get these,” she says as his marks glow an icy blue on her face. Allura cocks her head to the side, hair spilling heavy and slow over one shoulder. “Is that a problem.”

(it’s not quite a question, not quite a threat, and if he wasn’t in love before he is now. 

he always did have a type)

Lotor studies her for a long time as a puzzle piece finally slots into place. (He feels both humbled and stupid and hates both feelings with a resignation that feels like a tangible weight.) “Oh,” he says, the epitome of intelligence. “No. No, I don’t think it is.”

“Your Narti called this an Outside Context Problem,” Allura says, not looking at him. She moves her hands across the waters and the scene changes to edge of the labyrinth. The hedges are high and as unyielding as a mountain. (it curves around her heart, all roads leading to ruin. there’s a metaphor in there but he’ll be damned if he can figure it out) “So, what’s the context.”

He watches her, cool and collected, but under it just a little afraid, a little unnerved. She hides so much of herself under the guise of command it’s like looking in a mirror. “Have you heard of the Arc protein?”

“It’s how carbon-based sentient beings remember things, yes,” she replies.

“It’s a retrovirus.”

She looks up at him, eyebrow raising towards her hairline, a silent demand that he gets to the point already.

He makes a fist and then wraps a hand around it. “Our ability to remember comes from the Arc protein gene’s ability to make capsids, essentially to function like a virus to encapsulate RNA and then transmit it between neurons. This is the basic form of our long-term memory, encapsulated messenger RNA transmitted via protein networks.”

Allura waves a hand. “I did have basic biology,” she says dryly. “I do remember this much.”

“Don’t interrupt,” he says and bats at her hand. “I’m thinking.”

“I suggest,” Allura comments and points to the scrying bowl where a storm slowly grows to monstrous proportions. “That you think a bit faster.”

“I told it that we were an infection in the system,” he says and then rolls to his feet, so he can pace. “I think I had that a bit backwards. I think _it_ is the virus, or at least as far as our minds are concerned. Armor, crown, center, and staff. These are all our ways of fighting off an invasion, an infection, our defenses, and we succumb when we don’t have the necessary relationships to sustain them.”

Lotor looks back at Allura who sits watching him, chin propped on one fist as she leans over the basin. (he tries not to read anything into her ghost of a smile) She makes a little gesture with her free hand. “And the sun has come out,” she says, reference so oblique that it eludes him entirely. “Never mind, continue?”

He frowns at her. “I can see you have also spent too much time with your Blue Paladin.”

She dimples. “I thought any time at all was too much time?”

Lotor mutters under his breath before recalling himself to his purpose. “You have, effectively, encapsulated our entity.”

He can see her process that thought in the way she slowly blinks and her mouth pops open with a soft gasp of understanding. Allura stares up at him for a long, long moment. “I’ve _inoculated_ myself against it?”

Lotor drops to his knees beside her, desperately amused and horrified. “ _Yes!_ ”

“How?” She breathes and then presses her hand to mouth, eyes wide. “The maze. I trapped it in the maze.”

“A never-ending, continuously-looping piece of dreaming that traps it at the very center of your mind, unable to expand but unable to leave,” he says. “You’ve bound it to your very memories and in doing so changed both you and it.” Lotor drags a hand through his hair as he paces. “You have essentially used the quadrants of mind-war as a semi-functional Arc network to create a capsid of, as far as we can all tell, a chaos elemental older than the universe itself.”

“Well,” Allura says, looking stunned. “Well. I mean. It can’t stay there. That’s.” She stares up at him, blinking rapidly. “I can’t be having an eldritch monstrosity living in the inside of my head! It’s my head! _I_ live here.”

Lotor splutters out thoroughly bemused laugh and she smacks his shoulder. (he loves her, he loves her, he loves her. it’s a tragedy in every language he speaks) “Well,” he says slowly. “I may I suggest a method of mental gene therapy?”

Allura eyes him like she’s not entirely certain where the joke resides but is entirely positive one is being made of her. “Explain.”

“The Arc protein, the gene responsible for it, is also the primary mechanism for corrective gene therapy, correct?” He asks. Allura rolls her eyes at him. “I’m thinking out loud,” he tells her. “Not trying to insult your intelligence. Even the cyropod’s fundamental technological component for dealing with illness and involves the accelerated process of gene repair by through the use of Arc-dependent synaptic plasticity to trigger—” he waves a hand, “never mind, not actually important. What is important is the using idea of the Arc protein’s memory RNA antigen transmission process.”

Allura sighs heavily. “Not that this ramble isn’t fascinating,” she interrupts. “But is it going to approach anything looking like a point any time this decaphoeb?”

Lotor stares at her for a long moment, then sighs. “Well,” he says, feeling oddly chastised. “I was just thinking that if you could convince your subconscious to treat the, er, entity—is this how we are referring to it now? Far less judgmental than ‘eldritch monstrosity’—that we could potentially create an escape vector for it.”

Allura blinks at him. “You mean, you think we could just … lead it out of the labyrinth I have made around it and it’ll just … leave?”

“Labyrinth created by your cloak—your relationship with the person who best helps you navigate your emotions and sense of self—and I believe that the greatest danger comes from trying to encapsulate it, as if it were a virus,” Lotor explains, feeling excited despite himself. The myriad possibilities of how they could better understand psionic activity, from mind-war to more mundane applications, spilled before them. He waves his hands excitedly, trying not to bounce. “It’s a question of finding appropriate framework.”

Allura watches him with a hand pressed to her mouth, eyebrows up and, for all appearances, deeply amused. “Framework,” she echoes. “Here’s a question: has anyone tried just … talking?”

Lotor blinks. “I am not certain that is wise,” he says, trying to not suggest in tone or body language that he thinks this is wildly and impressively stupid. “It’s an entity born of a white hole—a cosmic phenomenal that should not, by most of the theorems of physics that we have—even exists.”

She gives him a dainty shrug. “Maybe it’s lonely.”

“ _Lonely_ ,” Lotor says. (squawks. that’s a squawk, the way his voice soars towards the upper registers) “You think an eldritch monstrosity older than the death of stars is _lonely_.”

“Well,” she says slow and thoughtful in a way that can only be mocking. “That is a very long time to be alone. Don’t you think?”

He stares at her for what seems a very long time. Allura stares back, expression serene. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Stares some more as all the words for all his clever arguments wither in his throat like flowers in a dry summer. She is impossibly, painfully kind as she stands and pats his shoulder gently. She slides her hands downs his shoulders, and he lets her, lets her wrap slender fingers at have the stars own strength in them around the delicate bones of his wrist and drag him up to standing.

Stares down into her dark eyes, watches her solemn expression, until she cocks her head and something wild and fae slides into the cast of her features. (it’s a controlled type of madness he recognizes all too well. like calls to like after all) Her hands tighten around his wrists, just this side of painful.

“Do you trust me?” She asks, as if there were any doubt. He’s followed her into her fractured mindscape. Across his own fevered dreaming. Followed her through realms nightmarish and beautiful. If she wants to sit down for tea with a lonely mad god, well, he’ll follow her there too.

“Don’t play dumb,” he tells her instead. “It ill suits you.”

Her smile is knife-edged and gorgeous.

(he always did have a type)

Allura gives him no time to acclimate to the idea. No gentle reprieve to steady his defenses. She is, when she has decided upon her course, relentless and just this side of cruel. It would be easy to hate her, if she did not hold herself to the same cutting edge. 

The endless plain of little pink flowers with their dainty triangle petals falls away into the void, a spill of delicate petals out into oil-slick, glittering darkness that warps his perceptions. He closes his eyes against the sudden burst of vertigo and Allura’s hands on his wrists are they only center he knows. 

His knees hit dirt and he vomits bitter bile, black and thick, in wrenching heaves.

“You realize that is not necessary,” Allura comments after he carries on like this for a little while. Lotor presses a hand against his mouth. The grass under his feet is pristine and no acid aftertaste burns in his mouth. Allura quirks an eyebrow at him as he straightens.

“Not all of us have your enviable mental control,” he responds. She rolls her eyes at him before turning away to contemplate their current location.

They stand before a great wall that runs towards the horizon in either direction, high and forbidding. Allura makes a tutting noise and places one hand upon the stone. It warps for a moment before snapping back into crisp focus. Still brick. Still solid.

Allura clicks her tongue against her teeth. “So stubborn,” she mutters.

“You do realize you are speaking about yourself, yes?” Lotor asks, an idle wonder.

She wobbles her hand from side to side. “Yes and no.”

Before he can demand an answer for that particularly oblique response the maze mutates, shifts around them, until they stand at a dead end, a path opening behind them. Allura laughs and tugs him after her. “Going backwards to go forwards?” She asks the air. “You really are not subtle.”

The maze shifts again as if in vindictive response. For one dizzying moment they stand upside down on a long staircase that curves into darkness lit only by a spill twinkling stars. Allura’s doppelgänger looks up at them from her own staircase and sighs. 

“Subtlety,” the entity tells Allura. “Is not one of your virtues.” 

Allura concedes this with a small nod. “No, I suppose it is not. Are all my virtues yours then?”

It shrugs—Allura’s little abbreviated gesture seems oddly mutated on her doppelgänger’s form, all things writ odd and warped as if refracted through crystal—and smiles at her, fangs dainty and grim. “If mine are yours.”

Allura smiles until she dimples and extends one hand down to where the entity reaches up. “Now that,” she tells it. “Is being vague and cagey for the sake of it.”

“You think it makes you sound deep,” the entity tells her with a disconcerting smile. “But we both know it’s just a mask for the fact that you have no idea what you are doing.”

Allura—his Allura, the real Allura, though now he unsure and deeply unsettled (is she even his for him to think such a thing)—makes a face. “As true as that might be,” she says. “There’s no reason for you to actually go and say it.”

The entity smiles at Allura with her own face, and Lotor thinks there must be some sort of cosmic rule against this. Some fundamental theorem that prevents this sort of thing from happening without resulting in the utter disintegration of the rules of reality. (it might be resulting in his complete mental breakdown. he’s surprisingly copacetic with his impending nervous break) Lotor watches the pair of them watch each other from their inverted staircases. They are, he thinks, invertible matrix—each trait a communicative ring.

It flicks its fingers in a universal gesture of dismissal.

“Who else would tell you,” it wonders. “Who else would you even hear this from?” 

“No one,” Allura tells it.

Lotor catches her wrist as the world twists, the geometry of the place sliding like a child’s puzzle, and she slides her hand into his, palm to palm, fingers slotting together. (it’s the only anchor he has as the universe goes slightly mad. he tells himself it’s the only one he’d accept. but he has always been a godsdamned liar) 

The labyrinth slides out before them, paths and walls and cunning traps unfurling at the speed of thought. It’s as lovely and terrifying as the being that stalks towards them. Her hips a parody of Allura’s sway. Her hair mimicry of that glorious mane. Her sharp-boned features cast in perfect symmetry. But Lotor can spot the glitch in the copy now, the one mistake that mars it as a forgery.

Allura laughs beside him, high and bright. “ _что по чести, что юности, что свобода_ ,” Allura recites with a pleased smile. “ _Пред милой гостей с дудочкой в руке_.”

“Now you are flattering me,” it tells her. 

“Well,” Allura says, drawing out the word with a coquettish tilt of her head. “I’m entertaining an elder god in the hidden recesses of my own mind. A little bit of flattery seems only wise.”

It sighs as it comes to stand before her. It’s an endlessly mutating copy—certain features stay the same while others shift and change between every heartbeat. It leaves Lotor unsettled and breathless to regard them for very long. (watching her always leaves him breathless) He watches them regard each other and feels as if he were intruding.

“I did not know the word ‘loneliness’ until you,” it says after their great silence. “I did not know what it was to long for another, to wrap their words, their presence, their very being around you like a balm for the soul. I am unsure I appreciate the education.”

Allura reaches up to trace the marks on it’s face, viciously kind. “I am not sorry for that.”

“There are others of my kind,” it tells her. “Great and vast. Containing untold multitudes and yet we have always been sufficient within ourselves. You have changed me. I have been made small and fragile and mortal and now I know what it is to be lonely.”

“I know,” Allura says, her hands are gentle cage around the creature’s jaw and it flickers in her hold like a guttering flame. 

“I would tear out your heart and soul and eat them for this,” it says as it cries tears of living flame. “But I cannot now. You caught me in this maze. Others have used their cloak and crown, center and staff to drive me back, drive me away, but _you_ you caught me like a bird in a net. You took me into you and _changed me_.”

“I know,” Allura replies. She keeps her hands around its face even as its form spills outwards, flies upwards like a murder of startled crows—a ravening streak of oil-slick darkness that wails in her hold. 

“I am a ‘me,’ now,” it wails in million voices that echo across the labyrinth in terrifying cacophony. “He taught you how to fight, and instead you laid down all your weapons and _changed_ me.”

Lotor nearly jerks to hear himself suddenly referred to. He wants to hide away from this shimmering shadow that eats the horizon, caught between Allura’s dark hands.

“I know,” Allura repeats. She holds it still as it rages and howls in her hands. Holds and holds and holds until the great beast calms, grows silent, and once again stands still before her, reflecting back her own form with only one flaw—a deliberate mistake in the copy, one imperfection to mar the forgery. 

“What am I now?” It asks her. “I am beyond any concept of time—I _had_ no concept of time—and now I am _this_.”

Allura slowly, softly pulls it into the circle of her arms, hushing it with a wordless hum as it weeps, and they sink into the grass together, pressed tight as lovers. She presses her face to it the crown of its gleaming head and rocks it as it wails. How long this continues, Lotor cannot say. Allura kneels at the center of an endless maze comforting a creature that had no word for mourning. 

And Lotor? 

Lotor can only stand as mute witness. 

Slowly they separate. It traces arcane paths with the pads of its fingers across Allura’s face, her high cheekbones and full lips, and smiles. “I will sing your name,” it tells her, a terrible promise full of terrible love. “I will sing it without end and you will never be lonely.”

“I’ll miss you,” Allura says. “I wish you had a name.”

“I do not wish for this. I do not wish for a name,” it responds. “It is enough that I am a ‘me’ now. I could not bear to have a name.”

It presses oil-slick lips to hers and the storm overtakes them all.

///

Lotor wakes with his mouth full of hair and a heavy pressure across his chest. He sputters and claws at his face until his companion smacks sleepily at him, mumbling her displeasure into his breastbone.

He goes very still and stares at the pale, curved ceiling of his little cell as if that would help make any sense of the past—however many varga he’s been sprawled across a narrow cot with the princess of the Castle of Lions draped across his chest like a self-satisfied cat. 

Allura makes a little pleased hum as she stretches along side him, cool fingers finding their way under his armor to flex against the soft skin of his stomach. (something very like a shiver of fear runs through him quick as an electrical fire as he remembers the damage those delicate hands could deal even if only in a dream) He shifts, and she complains, voice rasping and sleep-heavy.

Her hair is a heavy blanket spilling across his breast, over his face, soft as silk and clinging. He tangles its curls in his fingers and wonders.

Tilting his head, he finds the Green and Blue Paladins sprawled across the floor, deep in slumber as if under a spell, their limbs tangled and Pidge’s laptop casting strange and shifting shadows across their slack faces. Lance has an arm slung across the girl’s tiny body, fingertips brushing the grip of his rifle. Even in sleep he stands ready to defend them. 

(Lotor traces the arc that weapon would make if Lance swung into place while waking. its muzzle would point straight at Lotor’s head. he's obliquely flattered by that) 

The narrow confines of his little cell are full of the soft sounds of sleep—little breathy sighs and quiet movements—and the light a fragile, uncertain thing.

He shifts slowly just to feel the weight of her move with him. To hear her murmured complaints. To breath deep the perfume of her hair. (he loves her, he loves her, he loves her. it's a song, a slow and endless beat, under his skin) It’s a simple comfort, the mute clinging of mortal bodies, and one he’s impossibly, eternally grateful for.

(they’ve stood on the far horizon of the impossible, kissed a god of eldritch powers, and lived)

“Be quiet,” she groans into his chest, smacking feebly at his face.

“I haven’t said a word,” he murmurs into the cloud of her hair.

She finds his mouth and presses her hand across it. “You think too loud,” she whines. “Quiet.”

A small stylus bounces off the wall and drops onto his face. Lotor throws it back without looking.

“Shut up, Prince,” Lance complains as he rolls onto his back. “We saved the day, huzzah huzzah, now shut up and sleep.”

Lotor sputters around Allura’s hand and she presses down more firmly. She shushes him with a wordless hum, low and soothing. It’s a song that hovers on the edges of his memory, but she runs her fingers through his hair, tangling their locks together, and he forget it. Lets her tug him down into still and dreamless sleep.

(they’ve stood on the shore of the impossible where tidal distortions make waves of stars, kissed an eldritch monstrosity, and still live)

**Author's Note:**

> References by order of appearance:  
> [ "A 200-s Quasi-Periodicity Following the Tidal Disruption of a Star by a Dormant Black Hole" by R. C. Reis, J. M. Miller, M. T. Reynolds, K. Gultekin, D. Maitra, A. L. King, T. E. Strohmayer](https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.1046)  
> [ Guilliame Apollinaire's "Clotilde"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50042/clotilde)  
> [ Yeat's "The Second Coming"](http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html)  
> [ Alexander Blok's "Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,"](http://culturedarm.com/alexander-blok-night-street-street-light-drugstore-1912/)  
> [ Gottfried Benn's "Cycle" in _the Morgue and Other Poems_](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cycle-39/)  
> [ Outside Context Problem from Iain Banks' _Excession_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession)  
> [Memory as the result of an ancient virus](http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/our-memory-comes-from-an-ancient-virus-neuroscientists-say)  
> [PT's "Scarlet and Bible Black"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/288446/chapters/460526) which continues to be one of my favorite stories.  
> [The Arc protein and mRNA transfer](http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(17\)31504-0)  
> [ H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthuhlu](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx) (seriously, y'all should not be surprised at that one.)  
> [ Dickerson's "The Sun Has Come Out To Play"](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sun-has-come-out-to-play/)  
> [ Anna Akhamatova's "The Muse"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=28754) (my favorite poem)
> 
> And the very last, of course, when the entity is mourning their change, is from Peter S. Beagle's _The Last Unicorn_


End file.
